Machinic Modernism: The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce

Machinic Modernism The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce

Beatrice Monaco

Machinic Modernism

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Machinic Modernism The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce

Beatrice Monaco

© Beatrice Monaco 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21936–6 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–21936–5 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Monaco, Beatrice, 1971– Machinic modernism : the Deleuzian literary machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce / Beatrice Monaco. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–21936–6 1. English literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature) – Great Britain. 3. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995 – Influence. 4. Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941 – Criticism and interpretation. 5. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885–1930 – Criticism and interpretation. 6. Joyce, James, 1882–1941 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR478.M6M66 2008 820.9⬘00912—dc22 2008020654 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents List of Abbreviations

vii

Acknowledgements 1

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Towards a Literary Critical Machine Modernism, the organic-mechanical and Deleuze Deleuze-Guattarian multiplicity, univocity, and the machinic The machinic and modernism

2 The Spatiotemporality of To the Lighthouse The transcendence and immanence of Ramsay domesticity Becoming ‘Time Passes’: the autonomous narrative ‘The Lighthouse’: aesthetic autonomy 3

The Visceral-Materiality of The Rainbow The primitive metaphysic of The Rainbow Sexual and temporal rhythms The inhuman-corporeal Gender and the decline of civilisation The rise of abstraction

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Ulysses: The Hyperconscious Machinic Text The aesthetic shift as double-action ‘Telemachus’: the microcosmic machine The cinematic textual machine ‘Primitive’ writing Bloom as capitalist subject: the cynical machine Nonsense, paradox and the imaginary ‘Oxen of the Sun’: the despotic machine ‘Circe’: the decoded imaginary ‘Ithaca’: the paradox of the imaginary

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1 4 9 13 18 24 38 43 49 54 63 69 73 75 77 88 93 98 100 104 108 113 114 117 120

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Contents

5 Ideas and Life in Conflict: Lawrence’s Later Works Women in Love: ideas versus matter Voices of freedom and of mechanism in the later works Lady Chatterley’s Lover: the deified narrative machine

127 131 142 147

6 Orlando and The Waves: Machinic Triumph of Form Orlando: haeccities and creative facts Deleuze and Guattari’s cosmic aesthetic The Waves: the pure machinic of form The body of life The rhythm of space The rhythm of time The rhythm of art

154 155 160 161 167 175 179 183

Conclusion

189

Notes

191

Bibliography

206

Index

211

List of Abbreviations AO DR FU LS MM PU TP WD

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze Fantasia of the Unconscious, D.H. Lawrence The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious, D.H. Lawrence A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Woolf

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Acknowledgements The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf, for extracts from To the Lighthouse, Penguin (1992). The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf, for extracts from The Waves, Oxford University Press (1992). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for extracts from Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Penguin (1992). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for extracts from Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Oxford University Press (1992). The Estate of James Joyce for extracts from James Joyce, Ulysses, Penguin (1992)

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1 Towards a Literary Critical Machine

This book began as a desire to marry what I perceive as the enormously rich metaphysical dimension of many modernist novels with the pragmatic theory of Gilles Deleuze, both in terms of his individual work and his collaborations with Félix Guattari. It was an impulse motivated by two salient impressions: of the visible gap in literary criticism of – especially close – Deleuze-Guattarian readings of modernism, and the sense that their theoretical pragmatics can illuminate aspects of the literature that traditional criticism has been largely unable to do. Deleuze has often been seen as practising a dubious form of aesthetic elitism that focuses exclusively on a select group of largely male writers and champions an inaccessible vision of the auteur. If the discourse of the latter half of the last century was partly defined as a (postmodernist) attack on the elitist and privatised spirit of high modernism, then Deleuze’s insistence on the importance of style in literature and writers could be classified as a rather obstinate anachronistic perpetuation of that spirit.1 But despite these formal shortcomings of both philosopher and modernist cultural practices, there is a realm of tangible philosophical activity, an intricate textual mechanics in these novels, for which, I believe, only the densely pragmatic and atomistic character of DeleuzeGuattarian theory is sufficient, and which offers the greatest scope for unearthing and vivifying. Both the style and content of Deleuze and Guattarian thought, which functions as a kind of ‘machine’, engenders a new ‘pragmatic’ reading space in the context of the academic text, which is otherwise beset by its own obligation to what Deleuze understands as ‘organic’ thought. This book and style of approaching literature will therefore be a radical departure from conventional literary readings. I will be working closely with the modernist texts in order to scrutinise a unique form of formal experimentation and linguistic 1

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pragmatics that is profuse in them. Yet unlike conventional modernist readings, I will be diagnosing the textual pragmatics against a wider cultural movement which was itself experiencing profound structural and metaphysical changes on the level of its organic and mechanical organisation. It is Deleuze and Guattari’s theory which lends us the freedom of a broad cultural and political backdrop against which we are able not so much to see, but to hear these metaphysical movements of the text and of that point in history. There are of course already several Deleuze-Guattarian readings of literature to date, which fall into more and less radical groups in my view. More radical are those such as John Hughes’ Lines of Flight (1997) and Jean-Jacques LeCercle’s Deleuze and Language (2002). Hughes presents a dialogue between philosophy and literature that combines useful exposition of Deleuzian empiricist modes of subjectivity, thinking, writing and reading in relation to the largely uncharted DeleuzeGuattarian literary critical territory of Hardy, Gissing, Conrad, and Woolf (The Voyage Out). LeCercle presents an experimental and challenging mapping of a Deleuzian language as a phenomenon which overturns the structuralist and Freudian underpinnings of normative linguistics, and which shows how modern texts incite a complex and open-ended Deleuzian sensible reading of surface, as opposed to one of depth and interpretation.2 Yet both these readings resist expansion into the wider, universal context that both the philosophy and the literature imply. In LeCercle’s case, rigorous adherence to the dense methodology of a Deleuzian linguistic science prevents him from exploring the wider sphere that is undoubtedly ‘sensed’ by Deleuze-Guattarian pragmatic language. Indeed what is striking in these and other radical appropriations of Deleuze and Guattari, in the context of literary readings and otherwise, is that extreme commitment to the pragmatism and empiricism of the thought can be just as confining and oppressive as an orthodox academic approach, in that the reading is held up by the task of unravelling and elucidating the extreme technical conceptual difficulty. Yet these pragmatic readings are nonetheless valuable, both for their alertness to the ‘revolutionary’ imperatives of the Deleuze-Guattarian project insofar as they read the literature ‘alongside’ the concepts in the way that the philosophers intended, and in the sense that they attempt to incorporate the innovative experimentation of Deleuze and Guattari’s spirit into their own work. Yet there is a less radical style of approach to Deleuze and literature that stubbornly resists assimilating the pragmatics. Ronald Bogue, whose work Deleuze on Literature (2003),

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explains the philosopher’s literary concepts through the window of writers to whom Deleuze devoted whole works or essays, and offers detailed expositions of core concepts such as ‘minoritarian’, signs, lines, visions and ‘auditions’, conducts its entire enquiry strictly through Deleuze, and offers little possibility for the literature itself to speak, and indeed for Deleuze’s concepts to perform and work in their own creative right. My own approach will try to avoid the restrictive danger that comes with either a traditional, or an ‘officially’ Deleuzian reading that is both radically and exclusively pragmatic. Although my investment is primarily with the literary pragmatics, I also will be partly adopting an interpretative and objective approach for my own diagnosis of the modernist moment by making explicit links between the novels and Deleuze and Guattari’s polemical critique of capitalist culture. Thus I will use Deleuze-Guattarian thought in locally pragmatic and diagnostic, critical ways, and as a kind of ‘cosmic’ backdrop for the whole project. It is the sheer breadth and holism of this backdrop that will free up a different kind of reading, one that can locate the literature and philosophy in this holistic picture. The style of project that was instigated by Gilles Deleuze and subsequently realised in his collaborative work with Félix Guattari, follows a process which can be summarised as dismantling the status of the ‘organic’ in thought, and a replacing of it with a new concept of the machine. It is by way of this ‘machinic’ reprogramming of theory that Deleuze and Guattari contrive to render thought and philosophy pragmatic, as opposed to transcendent and abstract. By engaging their pragmatic brand of thought within a vast context of epistemological inquiry, Deleuze and Guattari radically reframe some of the seminal issues facing not just philosophy, but of simply living, in the modern epoch. In a similar manner, modernist literary texts can be shown to be testing and negotiating some of the same crucial cultural and rhetorical questions thrown up within the shifting intellectual currents of the twentieth century, namely those that pertain to the shift into the machine age. In this book I want to suggest that the novels are testing the rhetorical process by which Deleuze and Guattari arrive at a machinic reprogramming of thought. Hence the project will embark on a dialogic journey between the theory and the literature to explore what is it at stake in this process of pragmatic theoretical negotiation of the shift into the machine age. I will question what it is that might be lost in this radical infiltration of the machine into human life that is registered by the literature, what the implicit and explicit treatment of the organic/ mechanical binary might tell us about each author’s ‘willingness’ to

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metaphysically ‘become’ with the modern age, and how far novels can ‘become’ machines. It is therefore in a spirit of experimental ambivalence that I call these works ‘machines’. I will also question what is at stake in bringing Deleuzian concepts to literature. How can the concepts be used to bring the text alive in a different way, and allow the philosophical dimension of the text to surface? How can these concepts enrich and perhaps render more complex already densely covered ground in literary criticism? Might there be a limit to the use of such theory? The difficulty of bringing philosophical concepts to narrative is not inconsiderable: the extreme technicality and harshly mechanical lexicon of Deleuze-Guattarian thought often seems too scientific for the sensible and ontological richness of modernist literary poetics. There is a slipperiness to their theory, moreover, which in its imperative to do as opposed to explain, finally holds to no fixed ideological standpoint. Hence there is a strong sense in which the theory impels us as theorists to form our own critical ‘machines’ in response to it. My reading will in this way largely be an experiment of putting Deleuze (and Guattari’s) ‘machinic’ concepts to the literature, of fashioning a critical ‘machine’ out of them, and of watching how this machine functions.

Modernism, the organic-mechanical and Deleuze I have suggested that the last century witnessed a cultural shift on a large scale. In early twentieth-century European social and cultural life this shift manifested in the particularly charged modernist ‘moment’. The moment of crisis centred on the First World War, as a result of which core values and concepts surrounding the human and language were challenged, culminating prominently in what is known as modernism’s ‘crisis’ of representation. Yet the crisis of modernism was arguably a definitive moment of a process of intellectual and cultural unrest that had been accumulating for several centuries. The unrest consisted in the disenchantment with historically dominant Enlightenment ideals of progress, science, humanism, rationalism and modernity, those which measure success on humankind’s increasing use of mechanical means to subjugate Nature, and engage human life in ‘civilising’ processes. Enlightenment ideals were thought to have culminated in some of the most major and in most cases – destructive – events of recent history: namely, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, colonial imperialism and the two world wars. Modernism can be loosely said to consist in two stages of reaction to this shift: of initial faith in modernity and Enlightenment ideals, and subsequent turning away

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from, and subversion of them. The simultaneously creative and political impulses that characterise modernism as a cultural movement reflect this crisis. Indeed modernism is not a unified movement, but a diverse series of aesthetic, epistemological and ideological motivations. In art and literature specifically, these politically motivated impulses encompassed the production of protective political gestures, for example primitivism, that expressed the need to preserve organic life in defence of industrial and technological progress and mass culture, and radical formal experimentation and self-reflexivity as a subversion of realist and imperialist systems of thought and language. Furthermore, the later period of modernism bore witness to the art of the avant-garde, which, in contrary to the impulses noted previously, consisted in an affirmation of the (then) new age of the mechanical, technology and mass media. Together, my chosen works offer a confluence of these diverse impulses, and they also conduct their philosophical debates through the window of these impulses, reactions and incorporative gestures. This diverse set of impulses within modernism reveals an ambiguity concerning both organic and mechanical phenomena that is of great import to the concerns of this book, and to their particular formulation in Deleuze and Guattari.3 But firstly it seems important to clarify what is meant by the terms mechanical and organic. The OED defines an organism as ‘an individual animal, plant or single celled life form’ or a ‘whole with interdependent parts, compared to a living being’. In contrast, a machine is defined as ‘an apparatus using or applying mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task’. Both entities denote functional processes, but presuppose differences in structure and kind. To embellish these definitive differences, we can say that an organic form functions not only through the interdependence, but the hierarchy of its parts, and is self-causing (an agent) by way of these processes. By contrast, the machine is a passive formation with internally distinctive parts, and yet these parts are, like the organism, in an interdependent relation. Although the physical machine is, of course, a secondary function of the human being (organism), by traditional accounts, these two terms set up a (negative) binary between the human (the organic) and the non-human (the machine). It is precisely at this stage of the organic-mechanical dialectic that Deleuze steps in. Deleuze takes principal issue with the hierarchical (selfcausing) nature of organised activity and its attendant privileging of the human. In the context of the ‘organism’ of humankind this hierarchy and interdependence of the ‘parts’ manifest as hegemonic processes,

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argues Deleuze. It is the abstract systems and structures determining social and cultural organisation in human society that implement this hegemony. Abstract systems (of which real, technical machines are but an effect) are functions of the whole human organism. These abstract systems and structures are in reality merely only the most condensed manifestations of the functions of the human organism, those which are in a position of managing the other functions, and are that which give the whole organism its agency, its self-determination. Deleuze terms these abstract functions of the general organism of humankind ‘organs’. In a like manner to life-forms, these socio-cultural abstract organs set up a tension between a single superior and an inferior term, or terms that internally hierarchise the entity. In a life form these consist in the division between the entity’s agency and function, and in the socio-cultural organ, between the governing forces and that which they govern. Hence each process or term is reliant on the other for definition; the parts of the structure are interdependent. Unless otherwise stated, to avoid confusion between the different connotations of ‘organic’, in this book I will refer to the pre-Deleuzian sense of living organic as ‘vital organic’, and retain the term in its singularity to connote the Deleuzian ‘organ’ of human organisation. The hierarchy of terms or ‘parts’ that structurally defines the abstract organ carries over into the actual world that the organ (or set of organs) dominates, and dichotomises that world into abstract and concrete functions. In so doing, the world becomes divided into the immaterial and material and thence into a state of negative metaphysical disjunction, of which, of course, Descartes’ famous maxim ‘I think therefore I am’ is a key proponent. Within the organism of humankind, the hegemonic interdependence of the parts (of the social, technical and cultural functions of a society) functions by way of this abstract level of thoughts and concepts, which set up generalised concepts and superior ‘grounds’ for knowledge in order to organise actual life. The concrete, material, real world is subjugated by these organs of abstraction, of which the ideals of the Enlightenment are prime examples. It is the legacy of organs like those of the Enlightenment to have positioned the human being as the primary organising principle – as the foremost site of abstraction in its social organisation. In this way, for Deleuze, the very concept of the human is hegemonic. The more the abstract organs – such as the idea of the ‘human’ – develop in tandem with the ‘progress’ of civilisation, the more they turn against the actual, vital world and come to embody forces and instruments of oppression. In the twentieth century, the overweening effects of human organs manifested conspicuously as the

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two world wars and in the upsurge of fascism that attended the latter, with all its connotations of organic nationalism. The fascism of the last century is widely judged as one of the most sinister events in recorded history. It is an event that speaks of the potentially crippling state of cultural organicism: of a race’s single Idea of itself taken to its logical conclusion. In this way, Deleuze’s theoretical project reacts against the human organism and what he sees as its currently static and totalising functions (its abstract organs) in the modern world, under the proviso that such structures are radically inadequate for accommodating life and its propensity for change. He argues that all formed persons and their formal structures (instrumental functions) are despotic ‘molar’ manifestations of power: the subject, the body, political and social formations, systems or practices are all ‘stratifications’ and indicative of a coagulation of the forces of life (which he and Guattari term ‘desire’); they are both repressive and inevitable. Hence the complex, doubleedged nature of Deleuze’s subsequent political stance with Guattari, in which life both can be taken to a greater state of liberation, and yet simultaneously desires its own repression. Deleuze’s initial philosophical targets, however, are hierarchical thought and practices, namely the putative system of ‘organic’ representation, which he sees as the core legacy of the Aristotelian model of difference. His attack on the organic system is so comprehensive that Dorothea Olkowski has called it his ‘ruin’ – of representation.4 As Deleuze argues, because the organic model of thought revolves around an abstraction or superior ground – a fixed concept of Being and identity – so it produces a transcendent ‘image’ of thought which can only see experience insofar as it is mediated through a term outside of it: such as the human, the subject, language, or culture. This outside term has the denaturing effect of substituting the heterogeneous vitality of life (difference) with a general concept or analogy, and thus producing an equivocal account of life and being.5 In Aristotle’s model, argues Deleuze, all manner of actual experience and of immanent life – such as bodies, nature, flows, Being – become hegemonically subjugated within the representational hierarchy. Deleuze’s developmental dismantling of Aristotelian thought draws him to another philosophical heavyweight – Hegel – whose ‘negative dialectical framework’6 he views as the culmination of Aristotle’s legacy. Hegel’s model continues the tradition initiated by Aristotle, of subjecting the heterogeneity of life (difference) to an ‘analogy of judgement’, the principal objective of which is to (hierarchically) measure its subjects.7 Hegel’s model dictates that knowledge and self-realisation can

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only be arrived at through contradiction, or a determinate negativity that serves as a superior ‘ground’ (principle of abstraction). Deleuze, however, substitutes Hegel’s a priori negative with the (creative, experimental) problematic: with a ‘(non)-being’ without negation, which is ‘the being of problems and questions’. In this ‘nondialectical conception of negation’ the negative is the complementary ‘being’ of the positive, and is that in which difference differs firstly from itself, rather than from what it is not.8 Differential positing is a process of pure affirmation (of difference). At this point the system of (organic) representation that is deployed to convey the question/problematic of difference collapses in on its analogical premises, and becomes intrinsically rhetorical, insofar as it cannot claim to speak ‘outside’ of itself. Under these conditions, Deleuze’s account of difference is stated as: ‘it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference’.9 This rhetorical function of thought and representation will emerge as a crucial facet of the DeleuzeGuattarian project. In short, by way of a logic of difference, Deleuze alters the fundamental structure of metaphysical thought. Not only has he radically destabilised the organic practice of ‘representing difference through the identity of the concept’, but more significantly still, the correlation of this project is the dismantling of the identity of the ‘thinking subject’ that is behind thought.10 Deleuze’s chief target of attack, in this way, has been the cornerstone of orthodox Western thought – the Platonic ontological model of fixed being and origins. His differential logic, what he terms ‘differentiation’ (sic) – that can also be known as ‘becoming’ – dismantles the abstract, ontological presence presumed by Plato’s model, and replaces it with concrete, immanent asubjectivity. Deleuze has two terms to denote the virtual and actualising processes of difference: respectively, differentiation and differenciation (sic). This complete removal of the (organic) human subject renders Deleuze’s project radically anti-humanist. There is no subject or source of thought, but thought, like difference, is simply in itself: it cannot exist ‘outside’ of representation. Thus thought and language come to offer themselves as groundless (virtual) grounds for knowledge, in which they simulate (embody), rather than represent difference. In this event they are the (rhetorical) being of difference; they constitute a ‘materialist ontology’.11 As a becoming, thought proceeds neither under abstract terms (such as the human or subject), nor has it any goal; it is simply process for process sake. This pure process, this being which is (‘said of’) difference, of both thought and life, Deleuze calls univocity.12 Univocity is the singular process (plane or substance) of being/life. The Deleuze (and subsequently

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Guattarian) project can be conceived of as hinging on this restructuring of thought with a differential metaphysic. Their project cannot consist of a progress or rational extension of these ideas in the manner of organic thought, but can only be realised as an increasingly refined and proliferating involution into the terms and nature of difference in the rhetorical context of representation.

Deleuze-Guattarian multiplicity, univocity, and the machinic This book will examine the ways in which modernist literature conducted its own complex probing of the territory that is developed later on in Deleuze and Guattari: namely of the ambivalent status of the organic-mechanical duality, which can be seen either as the source of a fertile and productive univocal vision, or perhaps as a sterile modernist and postmodernist impasse. If modernism indeed surveys a charged historical moment, what are the technical qualities of that moment? In order to think about difference in the literature we need to delve further into the pragmatics of Deleuze’s thought. In effect, the logic of difference or ‘differentiation’ enables Deleuze to replace static organic forms – the functional structures of which are restrictively hierarchical – with the primacy of function in itself, with a function that is individuating differential affirmation. This style of thought therefore consists in a different way of seeing: of seeing difference from inside (affirmatively) rather than outside (negatively) – from the point of view of the parts, rather than from the whole. Another way of grasping this thinking practice is as a process of putting form into dialogue with function. In effect, Deleuze is making the first move towards installing the machine (with its distinctive, non-hierachised parts) into thought. If life is in a continual process of mutation (formation and deformation), in other words, always differing from itself, then a mechanical element in the form of the autonomy of the parts needs to be included in order to explain this random and localised pattern of mutation. Deleuze and Guattari draw this apprehension not just from abstract metaphysics, but from Nature itself. They argue that the real and important activity of Nature is not as a process of Darwinian natural selection between determinate forms, but a process of unprecedented (transversal) acts of heterogeneous coupling or ‘aparallel evolutions’ between the autonomous parts or functions of these forms. An aparallel evolution is the process in which two phenomena come together to activate a becoming, yet in a purely aleatory (non-communicative) way. The whole functioning state (univocity) of nature is continually altered by this unprecedented

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interchange of functions, which occur on the micrological level and that engender nature as multiplicity or as a ‘machinic phylum’. A multiplicity or the being of difference, claim Deleuze and Guattari ‘is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature’.13 The (univocal) whole is continually changing as a result of the interaction between its parts. All life is the effect of multiplicity: of a mutation that is produced though an open reciprocity between the whole and its parts – between all forms and functions – rather than from the formal self-determination of individual organisms reacting on one another, as has hitherto been presumed. Indeed forms themselves are little more than the (relatively) transient effects of an immeasurable flow of univocal difference. By exploring the intrinsic reciprocity that is in becoming and that occurs between univocity and difference (multiplicity), between forms and functions, and between the whole and the parts, Deleuze’s collaborative project with Guattari extends the logic of difference into thought. The primary tool (or dynamic ‘whole’) of their style of perception consists, of course, in representation itself. The energetic of a whole that is changed through the parts – of a tension between the Many and One – is the defining axiom of their epic intellectual production A Thousand Plateaus, so they proclaim in the work’s opening episode: ‘PLURALISM = MONISM’ (their capitalisation).14 Their whole philosophical experiment in this work is structured as a magnanimous double-vision that engineers the continual movement of thought between the pluralistic and the monistic. They designate dualised models of process, or ‘double-articulations’, to actualise this vision, many of which will be visited over the course of this book. The ‘double-articulations’ (e.g., that of the ‘molar’ and the ‘molecular’) privilege processes over finished things insofar as they pertain to different sorts of becoming, to types and states of formation and deformation, and to styles and ‘directions’ of movement. The doublearticulations reverberate with and enrich the process in which pluralism becomes monism, and engender a fertile, differential play that maps the reciprocal pathways between the unformed intrinsic to the formed extrinsic. Indeed one might say that Deleuze and Guattari’s work capitalises on a conception of a margin of germinal reciprocity between the intrinsic dimension of the process, and its extrinsic potential for functional expression, what Deleuze describes in the context of difference as the ‘genesis of affirmation’. The latter is the space of

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creative potential in which difference does not simply exist, but must be actively affirmed: difference must be created.15 In the intrinsic or intensive dimension of life, the radical flow of difference that Deleuze and Guattari term ‘desire’, life and process are completely unformed and immanent and in a state of optimum liberation. Yet in this pure matter or chaos there is a potential for active formation in which life could go either way – either form, or not form – as the case may be. Deleuze and Guattari’s interest lies chiefly in this dimension of activity that pre-exists and propels the forms themselves. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari do not just acknowledge the intensive, intrinsic dimension of activity, they give it the honorary status of political force, as a ‘micropolitics’ of becoming – as that force which is the only one that can logically overturn the current, organic (‘majoritarian’) regimes of power. Their thought does not simply refer to intrinsic processes and becoming, but performs the force and the style of ‘minoritarian’ becoming, at the same time as speaking about it. The result is a shifting mutation between the form, the content, and the function of their work, in which the text internally differentiates and changes with its own change in the manner of a living multiplicity. The pragmatism of this method renders the work entirely rhetorical: the text is a process, as opposed to a destination, which consists in its own technical processes of double-vision, pragmatically, and indeed literally, insofar as the work ‘becomes’ through the reciprocal fluidity of their double-authorship, and through the connections the text makes between vastly heterogeneous realms of knowledge. In short, Deleuze and Guattari arrive at a ‘machinic’ practice of thought and representation in which all the structural conditions of organic thought (and organisms) have been overturned and inverted. Form has become secondary, and the (hitherto secondary) internal parts have become primary – the dynamic agents. Their thought pragmatically does rather than means, after the logic of difference and in the style of the intrinsic dimension of activity. For Deleuze and Guattari, life, including our unconscious, is composed of the intrinsic or micrological ‘desiring-machines’. Thus, they claim, ‘everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines’.16 It is this notion and action of the ‘machinic’ (which one hesitates in classifying as a concept) that embodies the insertion of the machine into thought and that draws together all of the components and attributes of DeleuzeGuattarian thought that have been covered here: ‘differenciation’, multiplicity, univocity, machines and reflexivity. The machinic is the

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thinking practice of these phenomena, as opposed to their abstract conceptual pursuit. It is principally in A Thousand Plateaus that the term machinic is most used by the authors. Because the machinic is – politically – a process of theory, as opposed to a theory of process, Deleuze and Guattari provide no analytical definition of the term in itself. To define it would be to denature the univocity of thought and life – of the abstract and the concrete, of theory and actuality, of thought and matter – that the machinic embodies. But the machinic is a politicised concept that gets to the crux of our organic-mechanical reading of the novels in relation to Deleuze and Guattari, and it seems necessary to scrutinise it on this count. John Johnston admits hesitation in his designation of a machinic ‘vision’. Yet he nevertheless offers a definition of it, as that process which Deleuze and Guattari oppose on the one hand to the mechanical, which applies to the machine as a functional unity of discrete but homogenous parts, and on the other to the organic, which applies to the organism as a hierarchical organization of biological organs. The assemblage itself is not opposed to either mechanical machines or organic bodies but encompasses both.17 As Johnston infers, the machinic hinges on the organic-mechanical binary, and transforms it, by way of a double-edged gesture of removal and reunification. To arrive at a machinic practice, Deleuze and Guattari reunite the most vital, processual property from each term of organic and mechanical, and reject their most static, oppressive property. They remarry the heterogeneity (the ‘life’) from the organic with the functionality of the autonomous structural parts of the machine, and also remove both the organism’s hierarchical (interdependent) structural organisation of parts, and the homogeneity from the machine’s parts. As a concept therefore, the machinic designates an aparallel evolution (in thought) between the terms organic and mechanical, which brings vision and practice into closer intensive proximity. This proximity corresponds to the intrinsic dimension that, as I have suggested, is the concern of this style of thought. Viewed objectively, the machinic is a hermeneutic move, in which Deleuze and Guattari restore (an account of) vital function to its integral state of unity. It is the very term machinic, which exposes (a certain stage of) the intrinsic fluidity; the context in which both organs and machines (which inspire the organicmechanical binary) are simply functional extensions of an integral, singular process. The use of the term machinic by Deleuze and Guattari,

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in lieu of actual and semantic organic and mechanical determinations, suggests the larger evolutionary processes by way of which human thought is attempting to come into a closer proximity with its own functions, and the point at which certain extrinsic manifestations and functions (that are deemed organic or mechanical) are no longer useful. Neologisms like ‘machinic’, such as are created by Deleuze and Guattari, can expose these deeper processes.

The machinic and modernism But this shift of consciousness and culture was already well underway in the early twentieth-century, as I have previously suggested. In the modernist period there was both intense cultural scrutiny and critique of certain extrinsic formations – both classifiably organic and mechanical – and evolving development in the apprehension of intrinsic process. Indeed many of the Deleuze-Guattarian thought processes that I have described as leading up to, and constituting a machinic practice – double-vision, multiplicity, attention to intrinsic process and interdisciplinarity – are not in any way confined to the philosophers, but continue a tradition that was richly present in modernism, indeed that can be more rightly classified as modernist. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘double-articulation’, for example, can arguably be viewed as an elaboration of the process that was formulated by eminent modernist philosopher Henri Bergson as his ‘intuitive’ method. Through this method Bergson creates a practice within philosophy for producing a dynamically dual thought (that realises the reciprocity of pluralism and monism) by way of a theory of the interaction between composite mixtures of qualities (dualities). The method is a revolutionary way of validating the plurality of monism, by pushing each term of the composite ‘beyond the turn’ of experience, in order to find the ‘virtual’ point at which they reconnect. In his work Bergsonism, Deleuze praises Bergson’s method as responsible for establishing ‘philosophy as an absolutely “precise” discipline, as precise in its field, as capable of being prolonged and transmitted as science itself is’.18 But the analogy of Bergson with science is not a superficial one. In the early twentiethcentury, running parallel to ‘intrinsic’ innovations in philosophy, some remarkable developments in science were underway. Science and mathematics (notably, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity) were making quantum discoveries that validated the theory of univocity, by proving that movement, as opposed to fixed, immutable essences, was at the seat of all life. Einstein verified that life could be viewed on

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Machinic Modernism

the sub-atomic level as waves of particles, and thus as a single plane of substance.19 In this event, science was starting to come into awareness of the vibrational conditions of life and thus of itself as the mechanism of percipience. In the same way, Bergson’s revelation that perception and matter differ only by a matter of degree (that perception is a ‘vibration’) brought him to a similar (quantum) revelation of his epistemological medium. Hence well before the arrival of cultural studies and Deleuze and Guattari, thought was rehearsing its own becoming, and exploring a univocal, molecular dimension through some highly technical and interdisciplinary methods. Thought was travelling both inward, and beyond (‘out of’) itself – a double movement. Both the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and much (ongoing) work in the area of cultural studies rehearse and build on these modernist experiments. Indeed, claims Paul Patton, insofar as Deleuze ‘accepts Nietzsche’s view that thought is a matter of creation’, his position is modernist. 20 Not just for Deleuze, but also for these writers, philosophers and mathematicians, thought and the representational systems that convey thought become the very material (as opposed to the abstract explanation) of life and creation. Modernist literature was no less involved in this wave of epistemological reflexivity and ‘involution’ of cultural consciousness into the intrinsic dimension of life. My selected works are rich with responses to and adaptations of these technical developments in science, mathematics and psychical studies. The ‘fertilisation’ of the works of literature with science is the effect of the assiduous attention paid by the writers to these developments. Like these other realms of study, literature was in the process of turning away from its own organic form and using the ‘parts’ of the form as an inverted lens, or as a machinic tool, for examining intrinsic processes. Just as the revelation of dynamism at the heart of all life forced the scientific practice of the period to become more dynamic and flexible – more creative, one can argue – in order that the discipline could attend to this micro-level of life, so writing came to use that which had hitherto been presumed un-novelistic (inhuman). Writing started to use its own materials of creation as a lens through which to expand its vision of life. As has been much examined in literary criticism, this characteristic self-percipience of modernist literature consists in the preoccupation with the bare tools of creation like language, form, style and even the internal mechanics of consciousness itself, as in the ‘stream of consciousness’. It was mentioned previously that humankind has tended to separate form and function, a factor that has been traditionally born out by the radical opposition between

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literature and the arts (the ideas and forms of society) and science (its function and account of processes). But that the epistemological territories of these two abstract organs literature and science – previously viewed as antithetical – were starting to converge, speaks of the extent of the cultural advance towards greater proximity in the intrinsic and extrinsic margin described previously. By the same token, these interchanges also mark the early twentieth century as an especially potent moment of the process of evolutionary imperative towards change. In the event of an increasing attendance to the micro-dimension and to proximity and fusion between form and function, the modernist literary work became a tool of the machinic. It is the localised machinic and univocally generating ‘fabric’ of each of the texts to be studied in this book that I aim to unearth. Each writer places a different emphasis on his or her machinic enquiry. They each take a seminal facet of experience that can be used to open up a rich, pseudo-philosophical realm of questioning and imply a more integral, scientific, vision of life and its functions. I ascribe these emphases to each writer as follows: Woolf’s is spatio-temporal, Lawrence’s concerns the body and material, and Joyce’s relates to language. However, these emphases are not firmly fixed to each author, but quite possibly overlap. Through the particular mode of each of these thematic angles, I will probe how far the novels perform and imply various degrees and states of the machinic. What kind of double-vision can be identified at work in the novels, or indeed, intuitive methods of philosophical inquiry? What measures and dimension of organs and machines in both their extrinsic and intrinsic capacities – and thus implied combinations of the organic and mechanical – are at play in each of their machinic angles? Part of this study may thereby involve questioning the extent to which the novels connect with the Deleuze-Guattarian machinic practice in terms of ‘subjectively’ conceding to and objectively ‘fulfilling’ it, for it will also be borne in mind that the machinic is foremost a rhetorical position, a statement of a single, provisional step in the recording of evolutionary process. In this context each writer’s machinic emphases will emerge as a mode of experimentation with finding a Deleuzian-inspired language for what is happening on a functional level in the ‘machines’ of the novels, but also one with a modernist identity. I turn firstly to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Lawrence’s The Rainbow as I see both novels as embarking on a similar journey. Together these texts open up the discussion concerning the intrinsic metaphysical structures of life, time, and consciousness, and initiate the project of their machinic reconfiguration. But these two novels by Woolf and

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Machinic Modernism

Lawrence cannot fully provide the structural answers and machinic illumination of the modernist moment for which the book searches. Hence, in the third chapter, I turn to Joyce’s Ulysses. I have chosen Ulysses because the work speaks of a kind of impasse in modernism in which time, history and language ‘stop’; in which they pass into a highly paradoxical stage of both gridlock and potential. I examine the ways in which Joyce’s hugely important work offers a holistic intuition of the structure of this new modern stage in all its organic, mechanical, and machinic variations and possibilities. This process of reading the novels as pragmatic machines is extremely experimental, and requires the book also to be a machine, the ‘functions’ and the directions of which unravel in immanent response to the novels. The shape of the book will unfurl from these machinic imperatives that are designed to lead into the depth of the historical moment in which our interest is invested. By intuiting the structural conditions of the age, each text is, to varying degrees, intuiting the moment in history that I see as coinciding with Deleuze and Guattari’s three stages of history that constitute a capitalist ‘universal’ history. The inclusion of a single chapter on Joyce, as opposed to two for each of the other writers, is due to the fact that in Ulysses we reach this level of depth in structure and an ‘intuition’ of a universal history. Joyce is the microcosm of the whole book because in his work we confront some kind of modern limit, after which point arguably, there is nowhere further for a certain type of thought and creativity to go. I then turn to later works of Lawrence and Woolf to examine their response to this same limit, and to search for both ideological and aesthetic answers to what is intuited in Ulysses in their work: the machinic in its positive and negative aspects, firstly as impasse (Lawrence), and subsequently as aesthetic potential (Woolf). My approach, although strongly conceptual, prioritises immanent, close readings of the texts in the aim of tracking these modernist movements and frequently heuristic textual intuitions. Inspired by Deleuze, I seek to instigate a fresh approach to literary reading that combines conceptual abstraction with concrete proximity. I have taken this route of Deleuze and literature because I think it imperative that theory continues to challenge its complacent acceptance of the transparent ‘surface’ of language and meaning, an acceptance impelled by the still dominant ‘organic’ style of thinking. I aim to draw back from the material (literary and theoretical) and create a space between my reading and it in order to hear the novels autonomously ‘speak’. Because they reject organic knowing and thinking, Deleuze-Guattarian thought lends us the

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machinery to create this space: the space to hear and to perceive, rather than say or explain. The thought gives us ways of thinking and naming different kinds of processes and movements, but equally it gives us the freedom not to have to name or interpret too closely. I turn firstly to To the Lighthouse to examine Woolf’s narrative metaphysics in the light of a Deleuze-Guattarian conceptual machinery.

2 The Spatiotemporality of To the Lighthouse

Like her modernist contemporaries, Virginia Woolf was engaged in a rebellion against realist literary forms, which she famously described as the ‘appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner’.1 Instead, she sought to transform narrative to accommodate the richness of ontological being. To the Lighthouse represents one of her most successful efforts in crafting an ontologically rich narrative ‘metaphysic’ in this respect: it is a parallel attuning of both the subjectivity of her characters (the stream of consciousness technique) and of her textual style, to an autonomous state of consciousness that is reliant on no extrinsic or transcendent referent. One can judge the materialist style of her realist predecessors as a classic expression of the Enlightenment ideals outlined previously in the introduction. These ideals have come to be viewed as rigidly constrained within a negative dialectic of binary contradictions such as that between subject and object, and mind and matter. Woolf’s narrative metaphysic emerged as a new approach to time, space and consciousness that could respond positively to the mutable, ‘in-between’ boundaries of binaries, and thus to the dynamic nature of experience. In this way, Woolf’s style has much resonance with the highly influential philosophy of her contemporary Henri Bergson, who, as previously noted, was a chief metaphysical progenitor of Deleuze himself. Indeed Woolf’s project links to the thought of Bergson and Deleuze and Guattari in important ways. Through his intuitive method and concept of duration or ‘real’ (as opposed to ‘clock’) time Bergson sought to bring philosophical thinking back into contact with the conditions of real, as opposed to abstract, conceptual experience. Bergson argued that scientific rationalism had cultivated the fallacious habit of perceiving time in terms of space, as a homogeneous backdrop in which events 18

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occur as they unfold in space. A seminal part of his legacy was thus to ‘unmix’ time and space and to reintroduce duration or heterogeneous time back into perception as an inexpressible and endlessly flowing process. This temporality of perception is a crucial component of the work of Deleuze and Guattari and of Woolf’s experiment, as I will later show. For Deleuze and Guattari moreover, the crucial correlative journey in psychic terms in what might be seen as a philosophical reprogramming (such as Bergson was gesturing towards) consists in the liberation of the unconscious from the Freudian shackles of Oedipus. In To the Lighthouse Woolf takes on both tasks: by substituting the homogeneous time and space such as is found in realist literature with the intensive space of being, she effectively undoes the limited spatio-temporal constructs employed by realism, and reconfigures narrative through qualitative time (duration). At the same time, she attacks the restrictive psychic formations held in place by familialism and marriage. All the novels under scrutiny in this book engage initially with what I am designating as human concerns. In the greater context of the cultural shift being monitored by the book, I link these concerns to what I designate as the ‘first’ stage of modernism: its humanist and naturalist stage. This stage lies in contrast to what I designate as modernism’s second stage, which correlates with the general move into a culturally mechanical age. Both cultural stages, and indeed the types of practice and valuing of each that goes on in these novels will become increasingly important in the machine of this book. Let us presently turn back to the idea of dynamic autonomy, and the aesthetic of liberated consciousness in the context of Woolf, which, as I will later show, in To the Lighthouse and future experiments, is largely a result of her novel’s passage through the first human-centred modernist stage and into the second mechanical age. This vision of dynamic autonomy again owes much to the work of Bergson. As previously explained, Bergson offered a radical new model for thought, one structured around paradox and a positive dialectic: the affirmative cohabitation of each term of the duality. By pushing dialectic ‘beyond the turn’ of experience, Bergson’s ‘intuitive’ method was in this way designed to reveal how duality is actually a monism. Bergson argued that experience, as we receive it, is already composed of dualities – of mixed things or ‘composites’ of different qualitative and qualified tendencies. It was the task of the intuitive method to unravel these composites – such as perception and recollection and memory and matter – and discern the pure quality of each term and see them in their relation. Bergson sees these two terms of the binary as the two different directions of tendencies, and if binaries

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Machinic Modernism

are simply two ‘directions’, then all binaries – a point that is crucial to the book as a whole – have their source in movement, in a simple flexing of energy, a pulse. I have already emphasised the sense in which dynamism is a crucial component of the Deleuzian and the modernist epistemological transformation of thought. It is particularly Woolf, of all the three writers considered in this book, whose narrative method bears most striking resemblance to Bergson’s intuitive method. There are recurrent examples in the narrative of To the Lighthouse of the extension of two terms or conditions (in the manner of informal philosophical pursuit) leading towards a single process or condition. In this context, in which binary is movement, neither of its terms can be reduced to lack, but are licensed to ontologically ‘be’ in difference, and the binary is always thus the fluidity of an ‘in-between’. Life is this dynamic oscillation between two things that is also a self-sameness: it is as if the very impulse of life is contained therein. This is thus a reconfiguring of thought to a positive dialectic: of thinking qualitatively as well as quantitatively. It is the very dynamism and creativity of this two-fold logic that, in Woolf’s literature, is the metaphysical stronghold. Indeed this two-fold logic or dynamic thought creates the ideal conditions in the novel for the liberated autonomy of consciousness spoken of previously. There are three discernible forms of this liberation in To the Lighthouse. The first, that I have previously mentioned, involves the human liberation from Oedipus and from homogeneous time and space. The second is in the form of a distinctive narrative autonomy aside from human activity: in all the chapters, but especially the second, the narrative plays the role of a percept or a perceiving thing in itself, self-animating and crackling with the microphysical dynamic of ‘force, densities, intensities’, that Deleuze and Guattari see as the eminent signs of modern art.2 The third form of autonomy in To the Lighthouse is aesthetic – in the notion of the female creator and artist. But all of these forms of autonomy in Woolf’s novel point to a singular metaphysic: univocity. Indeed at its most metaphysical, Woolf’s project can perhaps be essentially understood as searching for a form of expression for univocity. Univocity, as explained previously, denotes the paradoxical, yet harmonious coexistence of the multiple and the whole. Literally, univocity means that even as everything in life is different, it is all also dynamically connected and unified. Univocity implies the life or ‘being’ of difference, and thus a non-distinction between thought/spirit and matter, what Bergson classed in his own terms as élan vital. Woolf finally achieves her univocal metaphysical vision in The Waves. In Deleuze and Guattari’s, Bergson’s, and Woolf’s

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work, univocity is the greater metaphysical terrain that is pointed towards by this notion of a creative, autonomous consciousness of duration, that is facilitated by the flexing of the binary of two-fold logic and sought in the creation of multiplicities. In her metaphysical trajectory, which extends from To the Lighthouse through to its culminating point in The Waves, Woolf uses rhythm to develop and enunciate a univocal vision that pulses with this same logic. Rhythm is at the heart of life, because movement is; it is the continual play between two forces, it is the in-between. It is no accident then that the in-between (this vital pulsing of univocity) is so highly prioritised by Deleuze and Guattari as a valuable perceptual territory. It is the in-between logic, the margin of potentiality, that inspires many of their other concepts; notably the concept of ‘becoming’ and its sister concepts – multiplicity, haeccity and rhizome (all will be explored over the course of this book) – that also have their structural foundation in this same in-between logic. Deleuze credits certain writers, specifically Anglo-American ones, for practising a literary pragmatics, insofar as they write and live from in-between, always following ‘lines of flight’.3 Indeed Woolf’s machinic vision can be brought into a strong and close technical convergence with both Deleuze and Guattari and Bergson. Her practice of literary pragmatics, the being ‘in-between’ exhorted by Deleuze and Guattari, takes place on similar metaphysical terms as Bergson himself used: that of time, and to a lesser extent, space and art. In order to enunciate further the particular character of Woolf’s spatiotemporal emphasis and the creative perception that is germinal to the metaphysics of To the Lighthouse, and to emphasise the likely partnering of Woolf with Deleuze, Guattari and Bergson, I turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s (Bergsonian and Spinozan inspired) formulation of perception. To my mind, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of two counterpoised planes of transcendence and immanence form a concrete premise on which to read the dynamic perception or (pseudo-scientific) ‘material intuition’ in Woolf’s novel. As I will show, transcendence and immanence are active forces on both pragmatic textual and gendered characterisational levels in To the Lighthouse. Deleuze and Guattari’s formulations of perception give us a highly plausible means of thinking about what Woolf is attempting to do on a metaphysical level in her novel, and the way she is implicitly, yet deliberately I think, employing textual pragmatism to intuit something fundamental in human activity. In their philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari juxtapose a virtual plane of molecular activity with a surface ‘transcendent’ world – a continual flux of events, subjects and objects and forms (the comings and goings

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of our daily life). The virtual plane, that of immanence (or ‘composition’) is the site of the pure dynamic relation between particles of unformed matter on which there ‘are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds [ ... ] Nothing develops, but things arrive late or early, and form this or that assemblage depending on their compositions of speed’. Although forms are imperceptible on this plane, the plane of immanence subsumes the entire transcendent world. This plane of immanence (or ‘consistency’) is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the intersection of all concrete forms’ and monitors the vast ‘Abstract Machine’ of nature, which is the infinite number of multiplicities or structural combinations linking and composing animate and inanimate life forms.4 The plane of transcendence, by contrast, ‘always concerns the development of forms and the formation of subjects. A hidden structure necessary for forms, a secret signifier necessary for subjects’, and its function is to stratify and organise the flow of unformed matter on the plane of consistency. It is this plane of transcendence which is ‘constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth’.5 Where the immanent plane subjects particles to a continual process of deterritorialisation – a moving away from forms or roots – the transcendent plane activates the antithetical process. Whereas the transcendent plane provides the perceptual conditions for time to be homogeneous, there is no homogeneous, singularly traceable and measurable time on the plane of immanence, but simply different speeds of particles and molecules arriving late or early and surfacing and expiring, thus there are multiple potential ‘times’ on the plane of immanence. Deleuze images the temporal distinction and passage between these two planes in terms of a wound. A wound: is incarnated or actualized itself in a state of things or of life; but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that leads us into a life. My wound existed before me: not a transcendence of the wound as higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtuality always within a milieu (plane or field).6 In this way there is simultaneity between an actual event on the plane of transcendence, which is conditioned by the flux of time, and its virtual

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potential on the plane of immanence; there is coexistence between the ephemeral and the eternal. This has great resonance for To the Lighthouse, a novel that presents consciousness and subjectivity as perpetual passages between the temporal strata of the everyday and the eternal. In itself the plane of immanence is a-temporal: in front of and behind time, the future, the past, and the present all at once. It is a plane on which there is both absolute fixity and absolute movement, and on which all binary distinctions are dissolved. The immanent plane is intensive space, and identical to the unextended space that is the metaphysical basis of the stream of consciousness narrative. In this respect the virtual plane both occurs in and describes Bergson’s ‘duration’. For Deleuze and Guattari, human perception is itself an interactive interface between the two planes, a ‘transcendental field’ by way of which forms become actual, and available to our perception. Our consciousness is therefore a product of the interaction between absolute a-consciousness (immanence) and relative consciousness (transcendence). In To the Lighthouse both human consciousness and the narrative itself function in the manner of a transcendental field or semi-intuitive and semi-conscious interface, monitoring and mediating the flux of the outer life and negotiating it in relation to the inner life. Human perception is a mixture of the personal and the impersonal in this respect. Thus, Deleuze claims, there is a ‘pure a-subjective current of consciousness, an impersonal pre-reflexive consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without self’ that is not individual to us, but in which we participate, a sort of generalised liquid of consciousness in which we are all subsumed. This general subjectivity is of great import in To the Lighthouse, a novel that is structured around a communal consciousness, over and above individual subjectivity. Yet the interface between Deleuze and Guattari’s two planes only becomes apparent to us when consciousness ‘becomes a fact’ which happens ‘by reflecting itself onto a subject which refers itself to objects’.7 As fact (the mode in which we experience it), consciousness, and the subjects and objects to which it refers, fall outside of the transcendental field, in other words, they cease to remain in immanence, and become subject to a teleological (finite) temporality and relativity, indeed our perception consists of this relative threshold, as opposed to the ‘absolute’ threshold of the plane of immanence. Thus perception, in line with Bergson’s thinking, can only be temporal, in this respect, insofar as it no longer resides ‘in the relation between a subject and an object, but rather in the movement serving as the limit of that relation, in the period associated with the subject and object’, which is the movement between the two planes. It

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is in ‘jumping from one plane to the other, or from the relative thresholds to the absolute threshold that coexists with them, that the imperceptible becomes necessarily perceived’.8 It is clear that these two planes are a sensitised evocation on the part of Deleuze and Guattari of the active forces working in what I described as the margin of potentiality – between the unformed matter and its extension into forms and functions. This potentialised margin of activity, as I explained previously, is the site in which it is determined what does and does not form or occur. Hence the margin of potentiality between the two different kinds or force of process in the univocity of life is expressed as a tension between their absolute and relative thresholds, of which our perception is one example.9 The notions that perception is duration, and indeed that time only exists as a result of creative acts, are key phenomena in To the Lighthouse. If, as I argue, Woolf’s principal form of modulation is through a creative mixture of time and space, specifically through rhythm, which is a ‘doing’ of time, then it is rhythm which not only brings about a fluid, univocal metaphysic, but which dynamically negotiates this oscillation between the planes – between the relative and the absolute thresholds of perception and experience, between time and space. I will now move into a detailed and immanent reading of Woolf’s spatio-temporal narrative, To the Lighthouse, and explore these metaphysical planes and configurations of perception and consciousness in the textual and human world of the novel.

The transcendence and immanence of Ramsay domesticity In the first chapter of To the Lighthouse, Woolf begins to chart a journey through a novelistic metaphysics, which she explores through her spatio-temporal (perceptual) emphasis. Indeed one of the seminal characteristics in this first chapter of the novel is the intricate and playful debate that is being staged between immanence and transcendence, and the clear precedence that is given to immanence. Eminent readings of the novel tend to explore this same transcendent/immanent tension in terms of the strongly demarcated sexual roles of the central couple, Mr and Mrs Ramsay. Hermione Lee, for example, focuses on the different symbolic qualities attributed to the couple, such as the distinction between Mrs Ramsay’s sociability against her husband’s social awkwardness, and her mythical-poeticism against his factualism.10 Another strong trend of critical readings of To the Lighthouse has been to emphasise the (feminist) female ontology embodied in the mythical, maternal,

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and spiritual qualities of Mrs Ramsay. Daniel Ferrer, for example, sees Mrs Ramsay as the ‘multitudinous’ and ‘mythical universal mother, the fertile feeding element’.11 By way of a study of the intrinsic dimension of the novel (of immanence and transcendence), I would like to problematise these readings somewhat by suggesting that the gender roles in the novel cannot be seen as nearly so clear cut. From the outset, and in virtually all ways, immanence is given primacy in Woolf’s novel. Both the first and the last chapters, for example, generate immanent metaphysical intensity by their almost static temporality and singular location. They respectively recount a single day in the life of the Ramsay family at their holiday house, and a few hours a decade later in the same place. But it is in the first chapter that the ontological drama is highly gender-determined: the immanent feminine is given precedence and placed at comic odds with the transcendence of masculinity, thereby creating a tension between the diffuse psychical presence of women and children, and the structuring, definitive (transcendent) attitudes and behaviour of the men. For example, Mr Ramsay is a peripheral yet potent presence, ever-looming and threatening to upset the domestic sphere. This is established from the outset, when his curt comment – ‘But [ ... ] it won’t be fine’ – evokes a response in James; ‘Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it.’12 Although this response is silent, it is so passionate in resentment that it carries itself through an entire paragraph. As such, masculine contributions such as Mr Ramsay’s are like explosives: destructive (usually) and short-lived. Thus Charles Tansley continues the devastation by echoing the older man: ‘There’ll be no landing at the Lighthouse to-morrow’ (11). Men are on the whole presented as operating transcendently – usually talking, doing and moving – and yet paradoxically are only able to insert themselves into emotional reality in a limited, aggressive way. In terms of an overall narrative philosophical logic, Ramsay, who is emblematic of the male principle, represents a transcendent, assertive force, hence he ‘bore down on them’ (23) and ‘beat up and down the terrace’ (21). He also represents the extrinsic limit of things – of the negative, death, and lack – which is always threatening to impinge upon and which defines and shapes the lives of those ostensibly dependent on him, his wife, children and guests. His distress and outrage, therefore, that ‘someone had blundered!’ arrives like an intermittent force from the outside, delimiting his family’s emotional life (30). Undoubtedly Ramsay is intended as a parody; that of an ostensibly intelligent man, ‘the greatest metaphysician of the time’ (43), who is at

26 Machinic Modernism

the same time emotionally infantile and slightly mad: he ‘was bearing down upon them. Now he stopped dead and stood looking in silence at the sea. Now he had turned away again’ (51). So Lily feels of him, ‘never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so alarming’ (22). Yet it is his very needy, intermittent clamouring on the periphery of other characters’ consciousnesses that reinforces the narrative preoccupation with the interior life by setting itself up in conflict with it. In a musical sense, he is the counterpoint to the main harmony in this chapter: femaleness and immanence. The parody of Ramsay reaches its peak in the first section, as it becomes clear that his clumsy interjections are a result of the great insecurity of his own drama; in a Deleuzian sense the oedipal staging of his own transcendence.13 This latter activity, which has an investment in the success of his philosophical career, is also fed by elaborate escapes into fantasy (also a form of transcendence) such as the image of himself as a desolate sea-bird, alone. It was his power, his gift, suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he looked barer and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his intensity of mind, and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance. (50) The ‘desolate sea-bird’ is the mode in which Mr Ramsay experiences himself as a plane of transcendence: in his knowledge-forming capacity. Such self-importance translates in to his career that consists in an aggrandised quest for a system of knowledge that is ‘like the alphabet ranged in twenty-six letters all in order’, in which he himself has ‘reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q’ (39). Ramsay is a tragic figure confined to his own (oedipal) stage: he is like ‘the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed high enough to see the waste of the years’ (41), and with ‘eyes, glazed with emotion, defiant with tragic intensity’ (30). Ramsay is trapped in the same way that Deleuze and Guattari view the unconscious as trapped by various mythical and social structures of an oedipal culture, caught in representation and determined by ‘lack, law, and [the] signifier’.14 The female experience of Mrs Ramsay is presented as the antithesis of this transcendental capture – bearing more relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence, which, as we recall, is the absolute threshold of perception, and as such ‘cannot but be perceived at the same time as that which it composes or renders’.15 This plane causes phenomena to be revealed (unlike the first plane) at their sensual,

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‘outside’ limit, which is also the point at which they may mutate or dissolve. Likewise, in To the Lighthouse, Lily finally has an epiphany that concerns the mystery of Mrs Ramsay’s knowledge, that ‘one way of knowing people’ is ‘to know the outline, not the detail’ (211). The focus on shapes in the novel concerns this immanent form of knowledge that is intrinsically paradoxical, like duration: it is that which is both physical and abstract, in the same way that intuition is both sensible and intangible. Thus I link the plane of immanence to human experience in at least two ways: firstly, that the plane can be seen as a way of formalising or generating a model of what is otherwise known as intuition or instinct, and secondly, that it transmits information to us principally through our senses. With Mrs Ramsay both these aspects are apparent: firstly her consciousness is a kind of viscous, ubiquitous web enmeshed with and immanently penetrating the immediate realm. Hence, observes Lily Briscoe: the ‘house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs Ramsay listening; of shaded lights and regular breathing’ (56). Mrs Ramsay is like an expansive sensory organ presiding over the house. This maternal intuition not only engulfs things in their immediacy but in their eternity, or their entire temporal duration, thus she observes of James’ disappointment over the lighthouse trip that ‘he will remember that all his life’ (68), and she frequently ruminates on her children’s future. Indeed Mrs Ramsay receives much of her information about the outside world through her senses, in contrast to her husband who, as she observes ‘seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things’ (77). It is the acoustic dimension moreover, which figures centrally in her experience, as is clear from the constant references to non-verbal sounds in connection with Mrs Ramsay, for whom, in many instances, dialogue and actual words are of little importance. So Mrs Ramsay evokes for Lily ‘the sound of murmuring’ (58) and the former listens out for her husband, as for ‘some habitual sound, some regular mechanical sound’ (21), highlighting that for Mrs Ramsay the mechanical actually signals security. The following passage is structured almost entirely as a journey through sounds: But here, as she turned the page, suddenly her search for the picture of a rake or a mowing-machine was interrupted. The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window), that the men were happily

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talking; this sound, which had now lasted half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her. (20) The constant syntactical deferral and irregular punctuation, which is – deliberately – hard to follow logically, reflects the diffuse indeterminacy and the blind feeling of listening out, as Mrs Ramsay is doing. In this way, rather than orienting herself through dialogue and visual information, she engages with the sonic associations of a stream of superficial and random sounds, which, on a general ‘scale of sounds’, lead towards the ubiquitous sound of the sea, which itself ‘had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds’. For Mrs Ramsay all sounds lead to the sea, which, in itself might be deemed a supreme model of the plane of immanence – indeed it is this very thing that she is listening for, as a deeper vibration of life and an escape from the transient temporal flux. The sea is at times for Mrs Ramsay a source of comfort, a ‘measured and soothing tattoo’, and at others an ominous counter of death and destruction, and that with which she identifies the very forces of eternity (20). Aden Evans describes the relation between sound and time in the following way. A sound wave, he claims, is ‘a variation in pressure over time [which] has discrete characteristics, including frequency, amplitude, phase, shape. Each of these is a motion, a change over time. But, in perception, the wave is contracted, and the corresponding characteristics of the sound are a-durational, independent of time’.16 Therefore although a wave (of pressure) inhabits duration or time, when it is contracted into sound – becoming pitch – it ceases to do so. Likewise for Mrs Ramsay, sound is the direct mediator of a force of a-temporal eternity, which she accesses through the sea. To understand more clearly what Mrs Ramsay hears in her spectrum of sounds leading to the sea it behoves us to consider the nature and working of sound further, for which I take the lead again from Evans. For the latter, a sound perceived is a contraction of an implicated and silent whole ‘background of noise’, and each sound, which is always a contraction, therefore carries with it the implication of a multiplicity of other sounds: ‘the contraction is always repeated, the implicated implicates itself again’.17 Sound is that which always comes from drawing on the implicated. Evans’ hypothesis of an implicated body of noise has two major ramifications for our understanding of Woolf’s text. The first is that vibrations of sound still hang in the air even when they are no longer contracted and audible, and the second is that absolute noise is a highly tangible presence. Thus this implicated ‘absolute’ noise, Evans stresses,

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‘is not operating behind the scenes or after the fact, but is heard in perception’ (my italics). Consequently, there is an ‘entire history of sound, a cacophony of silence’ behind each sound.18 Similarly in To the Lighthouse (and as we will see The Waves) the text actually becomes sonorous and gives off a dynamic hum or reverberation of silence. The technical style of the writing is crafted to generate a continual sense of the implicated: through a tendency to use a three-stroke rhythm on phrases or in the expository structure of a paragraph, through incantatory repetition of phrases, through a seamless, grammatically limited and homogeneous textuality, and through long, wave-like paragraphs containing multi-clausal sentences which continually defer their own closure. It is this latter technique that I designate as the text’s practice of ‘withholding’. All of these elements build a great sense of the indeterminate implicated which lingers in the reading atmosphere as a tangible ontological presence or reverberation. This hum or roar of silence is also the planes of immanence and transcendence as they work on one another deterritorialising and restratifying – their constant interchange. It is no accident that the sea is an important trope in both Lighthouse and The Waves given that sound and the sea both function via waves. Indeed one might venture to say that Woolf is coming, in these works, as close as might be possible to write sound. I will turn to this aspect of the text presently. There is a second aspect of this body of absolute noise which has strong relevance to the phenomenological approach of both Mrs Ramsay’s and Woolf’s textual style and which is another way ‘in’ to understanding the possibility for a material intuition (both in a human being and in the text). If, as Evans claims, sound is the result of a perceptive body sensing variations in pressure and contracting them into an ‘air wave’, then what is implicated in sound is the ‘body’ of the world itself, because sound is a recursion of all the millions of pressures and forces issuing from the world, it is the world reverberating on itself.19 Thus sound is not separable from the world, but is the physical vibration of it; sound is the plane of immanence, which carries a massive quantity of virtual information about the world. The world both contracts to produce sound whilst sensing its own production. For Evans, sound ‘is a modulation of difference, a difference of difference’, and therefore, he claims, what is implicated in sound are sense and matter themselves. Absolute noise is thus a ‘depth without dimension from which dimensions are drawn [ ... ] the matter of matter’, which ‘places both signal and noise in relief, it is the inarticulate matter in which they gather themselves’.20 Sound is full of matter and its activities. Thus sound, especially that of the sea, is

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actually Mrs Ramsay’s way of understanding the material universe, from a Deleuze and Guattarian point of view a way of receiving and apprehending life as a qualitative multiplicity, as a heterogeneous diversity of elements and their interconnections. Listening is what we might formally deem Mrs Ramsay’s own ‘transcendental empiricism’, just as senses are the transcendental field spoken of by Deleuze.21 Moreover sound is the world’s ‘self-sensing’ – implying a radical lack of subject-object duality. This lack of subject-object duality applies no less to the body that senses sound, the body that is (it must follow) perhaps primarily monitoring the variations in pressure of itself, in addition to those of the world around it. This is certainly a conception supported by Bergsonian phenomenology, which I will come to later. In this way, we can say that Mrs Ramsay and the narrative style are practising an almost identical form of transcendental empiricism: they are ‘sense-machines’, both sensing and sensed, and as such, character and text are in a kind of symbiosis in this first chapter, for example in Mrs Ramsay’s response to Charles Tansley as they walk together: He was an awful prig – oh yes, an insufferable bore. For, though they had reached the town now and were in the main street, with carts grinding past on the cobbles, still he went on talking, about settlements, and teaching, and working men, and helping our own class, and lectures, till she gathered that he had got back entire selfconfidence, had recovered from the circus, and was about (and now and again she liked him warmly) to tell her – but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs Ramsay could not help exclaiming, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men. That was the view, she said, stopping, growing greyer-eyed, that her husband loved. (16–17) This technique has of course traditionally been described as the stream of consciousness, which, in placing overt emphasis on thoughts and feelings, as opposed to dialogue and action, creates a reading experience that is a floating journey through an emotional and contemplative milieu. There are various kinds of phenomenal and metaphysical

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mediation going on in this kind of style. The first is acoustic. This is exactly the style that produces the acoustic ‘hum’ of silence or absolute noise explained previously through the wandering sentences with their multiple clauses and deferred closure. The second is temporal. There are two ‘speeds’ of time being transmitted here: the intrinsic eternal (Mrs Ramsay) and the extrinsic transient (Tansley), which are immanence and transcendence respectively. It is the dense textual rhythm that causes these two speeds to be replayed in the reader’s consciousness, which also begins to run on double time. The third form of mediation is spatial. Spatial disorientation is generated by the lack of conventional grammatical boundaries between internal responses and dialogue that are characteristic of free indirect speech. As I will later explore in more depth, the (modernist) technique of free indirect speech invokes a radically mobile space of enunciation that reflects Einstein’s relativistic logic that was emerging in Woolf’s time of writing. Hence in this style boundaries clearly occupy secondary status, and the disorientation is both visual and cognitive. The text has abandoned all the usual inner/outer spatial boundaries, and what this does, here and everywhere in the text, is heighten the reader’s sensibility of qualitative space because the shift between realms of inner and outer necessitates our cognitive participation. We must act and make the distinction every time between what is internal and what is explicitly being said and we cannot lean on any normative grammatical boundaries. In this event space has become a pure virtual potential, and we are being asked to configure it. It becomes a condition of ‘real’ experience – between reader and text. This is therefore a genuine narrative pragmatics that configures reality as provisional, vital, and multidimensional. Rhythm is so important in Woolf’s spatio-temporal metaphysic, both in this novel and future experiments, that it seems pertinent now to look at how her rhythms work. The textual rhythm, here as elsewhere, is strongly dictated by a ‘three-stroke’ principle. A dense imbrication of three-stroke rhythms populate this passage, which are all the more intensive for being that of Mrs Ramsay’s consciousness, given that she is so much a primary orchestrator in this first chapter. There is the three-stroke rhythm of her own feelings, which are equally spaced at the beginning, the middle (in parenthesis) and the end of the selected passage – the final one being the sentence on its own. Subsequently there are three sections of three-beat rhythm internal to the passage: in the first section there is external contextualisation, ‘carts grinding past’, and then Tansley, ‘still he went on talking’. Tansley’s dull talk is

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synonymous with – and therefore a rhythmical extension of – the first beat concerning the ‘carts grinding’. Mrs Ramsay’s satisfied conclusion that Tansley’s confidence has been restored falls on the third beat of this rhythmical phrase. Subsequently there are three short strokes which physically contextualise the two in relation to the lighthouse, the third stroke being Mrs Ramsay’s climactic response ‘Oh how beautiful!’. Then there is a shift into her perception of the lighthouse, also three-stroke. The third stroke of this final rhythmical phrase is longer, hence: ‘and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men’ is a simultaneously singular and multiple (and thus univocal) stroke of narrative which concludes the section. This extended dreamy projection at the end deepens the rhythm further and returns the narrative and Mrs Ramsay back – after being waylaid by Tansley – to full immanence; a regeneration. The passage is full of Mrs Ramsay as opposed to Tansley, because, as the plane of immanence, it is only she who can cause the plane of transcendence to be revealed. We sense Tansley through Mrs Ramsay, rather than see him. In this text rhythms overlap rhythms therefore. There is never a conclusion but an ongoing recreation and implication, like the action of the sea. This lack of conclusiveness is emphasised by Mrs Ramsay’s final sentiments here – ‘That was the view [ ... ] that her husband loved.’ The separation of this statement from the main paragraph (as if it has ‘broken away’ from the preceding rhythm) emphasises the provisional action of the rhythmical, immanent narrative and the way this passage in its singularity feeds univocally into a dynamic narrative ‘whole’. Thus Mrs Ramsay’s sentiment regarding her husband is only a conclusion in the local sense, the conclusion of this segment of flow in the dense, ongoing process that is the ubiquitous music of Mrs Ramsay over the whole chapter and of which she is the creative synthesiser. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines, Mrs Ramsay’s rhythm works through flows of partial fragments (objects): the provisionality creates a web of interconnection between the fragments, and yet the fragments connect by interrupting and stopping (rather than fusing with and communicating with) the flow of another. Each flow is broken by another and yet they all manifest in a whole creative interlocking, that is not an ongoing randomness, but cyclically structured insofar as all flows return and are periodically recuperated by Mrs Ramsay, who embodies the univocal source of all flow. It is the movement from pluralism to monism that is univocity, the vital pulsing, which I

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explained previously. Yet that Mrs Ramsay’s rhythm is moved on by thoughts of her husband suggests her lack of autonomy: she is only one active half of a duality, of which her husband is the necessary other. Kathleen McCluskey has done a valuable and highly technical study of these ternary structures of rhythm in Woolf’s narrative in terms of chiasmus. There is a rich pattern of two-part chiasmic moments in Woolf’s novel, argues McCluskey, of shifts from one thing to another (such as from isolation to communion, vision to reality), until the whole pattern is changed by the addition of a new element. Chiasmus, she asserts, works on all levels of Woolf’s text: the microtext of sounds, phrases and syntax feeds into the deeper, macrotextual level of the defining events and images of breakthrough and transformation. Indeed the whole novel is an active chiasmus (a ternary structure), as opposed to being an inert ‘too perfect’ binary one.22 McCluskey is using different terms to articulate the same dimension of Woolf’s text that I am concerned with here; the text as a material intuition. I am indebted to her comprehensive and technically sophisticated analysis of the hypostasising qualities of Woolf’s writing. Yet I would like to take the material intuitive reading a bit further by exploring the holistic ramifications of Woolf’s text, in which language, consciousness, vision, event, and textual style are crafted to feed into one another, and thereby suggest more profound, ‘cosmic’ interconnections. My reading aims to trace in the text’s immanent ‘material’ perception these lines of connection to the global and cosmic realm that are all the time so potently implicit in Woolf’s work. The (human centred) narrative in To the Lighthouse is in general structured in the manner of the above passage, as a series of realisational and emotional waves. These waves show all relational emotional exchange, but particularly that between men and women, to be invariably caught within, and conditioned by, a tension of opposites, in a vigorous oscillation between negative and positive. In the case of Tansley in the above scene this consists in his movement from discomfort and suffering and his subsequent joy and worship of Mrs Ramsay, and in her case a transition from dislike of him, to liking him, to joy at the physical view. One of the more pervasive ideas in this novel is precisely this: that the very condition of social and emotional life involves capture in these dynamic, yet unsettling dichotomies and oscillations. As I will show, it is the meditative, transpersonal consciousness of becoming that is offered as a soothing, expansive alternative to these tight perimeters of social life, which themselves always involve some measure of artifice and contrived action. Therefore whilst Mrs Ramsay effectively creates the conditions

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where Tansley can fall into the harmony of his own self, yet, by the same token, in the second half of the passage, her attention becomes selfdirected, and we are not only reminded that she is in control, but made aware that her accommodation of him might indeed mask her social reliance on him – that it is in truth a mutually sustaining arrangement. Hence the entire scene comically reveals the extent of Mrs Ramsay’s emotional orchestration: it is a skilful act of imperceptibility on her part which facilitates Tansley’s own wave of self-assertion to form in the deceptive ubiquity of her own. Again Mrs Ramsay’s functioning is comparable to the narrative style: the ethereal, infinite, ‘maternal’ effect produced by the rhythm and poeticism of the style (which is synonymous with her skills of loving and nurturing) belies the carefully plotted and mathematical structure that facilitates it. Therefore the effect of these waves of narrative in To the Lighthouse can be said, in their softness, evenness and poetic lyricism, to both ‘practice’ and to value the human and nature; they fall in with what I have designated as the first, humanistic stage of modernism. And yet such passages are also structured with mathematical rhythmical precision. It is in this respect also that we might see the peculiar combination of organicism and mechanism in Mrs Ramsay’s powers: her very beneficence is also subtly oppressive. Thus the section concludes with a comic subtlety, with Mrs Ramsay created in Tansley’s eyes as ‘the most beautiful person he had ever seen’ (18). Having playfully enacted the precise technical conditions by which women become worshipped by men and the illusion and skill this requires from women to bring it about, the section ends on a note of wicked parody of Tansley’s resulting emotional servitude and infantile attachment to Mrs Ramsay, finishing abruptly: ‘He had hold of her bag’ (19). What the novel is doing is taking the human realm as its subject, but challenging the generalised value of the human that comes with this subject, by targeting the structural composition. The narrative is showing signs that its own values are shifting, by revealing the structural duplicity at work in the human/natural realm, both as aesthetic practice and reality. There are many instances depicting social and emotional life in the same way: as a paradoxically woven fabric of experience that produces dry comic subtleties, such as above, and which more seriously contribute to the novel’s informal – playful yet serious – philosophical dialectic. As I have suggested above moreover, structurally speaking, the phenomenon of rhythm suggests that there might be a radical lack of division between that which is soothingly and nurturingly repetitive, and that which is technical (mechanical) and potentially oppressive.

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Indeed the text starts to disturb core binaries, and reverberate with the contrary fabric of univocity. As the text draws deeper into the intersubjective web of relations, it draws deeper onto their plane of consistency and into the mechanics of the Ramsay marriage, where thematic ambivalence intensifies. The duality of the Ramsays’ energetic ‘dialectic’ is brought to a point of intensity in their argument about his overall negativity and tendency, as she sees it, to pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There was nothing to be said. He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said that he would step over and ask the Coastguards if she liked. There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him. (37) The ontological conflict is played out structurally and grammatically here: the text acts on two simultaneous levels – of technique and content. Again both Mrs Ramsay and the text are functioning by way of immanence; through a withholding from extension in order, in this case, to counter the transcendence exuded and demanded both by Mr Ramsay, and by the exigencies of textual convention. Hence the intensity that the narrative generates by internalising thoughts and feelings and by refraining from externalising speech, is the same force (exuded through her silence) that Mrs Ramsay uses to win the argument – she triumphs by changing the ontological terms. As I have shown, the withholding force (here simultaneously of Mrs Ramsay and the narrative) is a significant component of the mechanics of To the Lighthouse’s metaphysic, and it is an instance of what I will term the ‘positive passive’. The positive passive represents a reversal of the negative dialectic that would place passive as the lack (negation) of positive. The positive passive (or the action of the plane of immanence) is the force that enables life to function: in Bergsonian composite terms the positive passive is the relaxation as opposed to active contraction, the necessary counterbalance to extension. It is one of the dynamic dualities, and perhaps one of the most fundamental because it concerns forces of life. As I will suggest by way of later novels, the mechanical state of modernity distorts this balance. The positive passive, at which

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Mrs Ramsay is highly skilled, changes the ontological terms of the exchange with Ramsay by counterbalancing his tendency for extension and externality. The force of the positive passive that is being set up by Woolf here, which applies to both the narrative and to people, is enormously important in the process of life in balancing the outward force of extension (that which constructs the world) with a restful gestational state of creation and difference. But as is suggested in the above and with Tansley, there is a scale of potential for Mrs Ramsay’s implementation of this positive passive force that, if activated to a greater degree (if extended), transforms itself into its antithesis and becomes restricted by the interdependence of the marital and sexual organic formations which structure and contain her. In the powerful scene where Mr Ramsay demands his wife’s sympathy, Mrs Ramsay calls upon all her powers of organic creativity, she is a ‘rain of energy’, ‘animated and alive’, ‘burning and illuminating’ (42), of ‘delicious fecundity’, a ‘fountain and spray of life’ (43), and also ‘a rosy flowered fruit laid with leaves and dancing boughs’ (44). This is all for a man who is ‘a beak of brass, barren and bare’ and like an ‘arid scimitar’ which ‘smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy’ (43). Woolf is clearly challenging the normative distinction between what is innate and what is culturally learnt about gender behaviour. What the powerful fruit-tree/barren beak imagery does is start to expose the falsity of the organic-mechanical binary as artificial construction. Mrs Ramsay is no innocent natural force when both so forcefully compelled and forcefully compelling herself to be so, when that which is ostensibly vital and spontaneous – the emotions/immanence – are being mechanically produced. Mrs Ramsay’s dutiful donation of sympathy to her husband denotes the point at which the vitality (or what is ‘organic’, in the pre-Deleuzian sense) actually becomes mechanical, when activated out of duty, and her vital, immanent powers are pushed onto the plane of transcendence, insofar as they have become a code for required and repetitive activity. We are therefore left in no doubt as to the nature of the Ramsays’ marriage-machine as a partially contrived arrangement with a precise ‘energetic’ economy in which immanence is readily ‘spent’ (and therefore squandered) on transcendence. It is no coincidence that, immediately following this scene, Mrs Ramsay is plunged into reflective doubt and a distinctly economic calculation of the emotional cost of the partnership to her own self and of the ‘inadequacy of human relationships’ generally (45). Indeed in this respect, the logic of both the love relation – in all its binding exclusivity – and of other human relations,

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are again, as we are repeatedly made aware, regressively paradoxical. Thus the Ramsay relationship relies on the concealment of its own internal contradictions: Mrs Ramsay must know more than her husband in order that she can conspire to preserve his self-esteem and yet must pretend otherwise. Hence she recognises that she is not ‘able to tell him the truth’ (45), that she must contend with the fear of imminent financial difficulties alone – she is reminded that the bill for the greenhouse would be 50 pounds – and live with the inherent hypocrisy of her obligation to bolster the ego of such an ostensibly intelligent man. This last aspect of their relationship leaves her with ‘a faintly disagreeable sensation’ (44), because, she does not like, ‘even for a second, to feel finer than her husband’ (45). As generative and wonderful as love is, it is also a limitative structure, based on a degree of insincerity and on the mutual collusion (interdependence) of two people. Thus the seeds of discontent with the oedipal structures of society and its relationships are very much present in this first chapter. The underlying message here is that gender roles are restrictive because both sexes have been falsely accorded a singular role: women are burdened with playing a purely loving role and men a negative and mechanical one. This is not really the case when in reality one sex is impelled to play both roles, which causes a spiralling of regressive secondary paradoxes to occur. In this way both men and women are hampered by the stagnating state of the binary. The concern to show the precise mechanical under-working of phenomena – of social and emotional interaction (particularly between the sexes), of narrative itself, and of art – is marked in this novel, and indeed the mechanical concerns of the three chapters correspond to this tripartite sequence: the social, the stylistic, and the artistic. It is this emphasis on the mechanical which enables Woolf to show us the fallible and vulnerable nature of humanity and its concerns, in which female vitality can collude in the mechanical restriction of the male element. In so doing she is inferring the imminent collapse of the binary, and unearthing the singular, univocal energy that the binary artificially disjoins. It is no accident that in art Woolf finds an appropriate and culminating (univocal) blend of the first two categories – the social and the technical. This is confirmed in the final chapter, when in characteristic style, the author offers the ‘secret’ of her own technical composition in Lily’s artistic realisation that: ‘beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly’s wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron’ (186). The paradox of this theory as it relates

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to Woolf’s own style in To the Lighthouse (and to Mrs Ramsay’s powers) is again, univocal: that a narrative that creates such a soft and ethereal effect can be so mechanically and precisely structured. It is as if the more one looks under the ethereal surface of Woolf’s narrative for these mechanics, the more they are to be found: as if they form a palimpsest, and are two ‘states’ of the same thing. Woolf is moving towards an evergreater collapse of the organic-mechanical binary and into a greater integration of the machinic into her form. Thus she is moving into the second, mechanical stage of aesthetic modernism, which moves her closer to Deleuze. Rhythm, which is arguably Woolf’s chief technical device, contains both of the forces within the machinic: a spontaneous, irregular and deterritorialising force and a territorialising, mechanical regularity which will ultimately bring the author’s whole vision to univocity. Rhythm is an instrument of univocity. Woolf shows us that human relations cause individuals to get caught in nets that prevent them from proceeding to a deeper level of the (machinic) process of life. But equally there is a positive centring of force in the female in this novel which pertains to the imbalance caused by the human mode: the female is the only force that can shift the terms away from their (relative) stagnation and redress the balance. Indeed the female principle is so central to the transformations in To the Lighthouse that, out of all the authors here, Woolf’s writing bears a more than passing – and indeed, coincidental – resemblance to Deleuze and Guattari’s model of ‘becoming’.

Becoming Deleuze and Guattari praise Woolf for practising the in-between or ‘intermezzo’ in both her work and life.23 ‘Becoming’, or the in-between, is the principal logic guiding these rhythms and paradoxical instances. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming designates the practice of not just emulating, but, more radically, of making one’s consciousness coincide with molecular activity, such as that which occurs, for example, between the two planes of perception described previously. Becoming thus designates a refinement of one’s perception with its own dynamic processes. It is the skill of getting in-between phenomena, and extracting ‘particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes’. Becoming is the process of forming a molecular affinity with something through ‘proximity’ and conjugation rather than by imitating it, on the micro-level of the desiring-machines.24 And

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this is exactly what we have witnessed Woolf’s text as working towards: generating a great sense of the implicated – the in-between – by way of the rhythms of a richly lived emotional life and of a physically dynamic narrative style. Becoming is the process of rendering the intrinsic a politically viable force. The most powerful becomings are ‘minoritarian’, claim Deleuze and Guattari, that is, they are of traditionally subjugated groups such as women, animals, plants and molecules, and there is no becoming-man, because man has already set himself up as the dominant term of life. Becomings are, in this way, micropolitical. The pre-eminent form of becoming with a ‘special introductory power’ is ‘becoming-woman’, the formulation of which concept appears to have been principally inspired by Woolf herself: When Virginia Woolf was questioned about a specifically women’s writing, she was appalled at the idea of writing ‘as a woman.’ Rather, writing should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming. Very soft particles – but also very hard and obstinate, irreducible, indomitable.25 Deleuze and Guattari credit other Anglo-American writers such as D.H Lawrence and Henry Miller with this literary skill of contamination. All becomings, the former claim, ultimately lead towards a ‘becoming-imperceptible’, which is the ‘immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula’, on the plane of consistency. In this case, the more one simplifies, eliminates and becomes abstract through lines or shapes, the more one becomes everybody and everything, which is ‘to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde)’.26 This gesture of abstraction has great resonance with To the Lighthouse, given its artistic trajectory and emphasis on shapes, mentioned previously. Becoming is an almost ubiquitously applicable concept for To the Lighthouse to the extent that it would be possible to apply the concept to more or less everything I have said thus far, and will say, about the book. The novel’s technical stylistics, and its emotional and ontological drama, which engineer interrelations between text and reader and text and characters, are involved in an intertwined becoming. But it is precisely because of the tendency for poetic expansiveness of this postmodernist concept of becoming that one must, I think, exercise a certain degree of caution. It is characteristic in Deleuze and Guattari’s

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pragmatic thought for concepts to act as hermeneutic umbrellas for one another; meaning the same things yet from a slightly different angle, and becoming is one such concept. Becoming is a style of concept which can verge on woolliness and generate a discourse of dubious rigour and value. In this event, I will proceed as judiciously as possible, in order to extract from the concept what is valuable and plausible for a study of consciousness, whilst limiting the tendency towards lyrical posturing that is spurned by this type of concept. There are many ways in which the narrative of To the Lighthouse might be revealed as tangibly structured around the site of becoming, the ‘in-between’ (intermezzo). The in-between is the dense web of intersubjectivity that is constructed – particularly in this first chapter – between the family and their guests, whether they are communicating directly or not. The segmented structure of the chapter accentuates this spatial journey through the intersubjective milieu. For example the beginning of Lily’s conversation with Mr Bankes that begins a segment: Yes, Mr Bankes said, watching him go. It was a thousand pities. (Lily had said something about his frightening her – he changed from one mood to another so suddenly.) Yes, said Mr Bankes, it was a thousand pities that Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people. (51–52) This style, which dips deliberately into action in an intermediate stage, conveys both the sense that sociality is a common ambience in which the characters are all subsumed, and that the narrative is a seemingly impersonal instrument dipping into/mediating a pre-existing field – a transcendental field of consciousness in which all characters are subsumed. The above is again emblematic of the multiple actions of Woolf’s narrative: there is again, free indirect speech, a backtracking repetition, for example, Mr Bankes’ – ‘Yes, it was a thousand pities’, recourse to the immediate past – Lily’s precipitating comment ‘Lily had said something’ – which is enhanced by its containment in parentheses, and the soft yet persistent tone of enquiry which is characteristic of the novel. What this narrative style is effectively doing is seeking to convey the ‘present’ moment as if by default: to encircle and get in-between it as opposed to definitively and logocentrically pinning it down or essentialising its moment(s). In this way the experience and the representation of the temporal present in To the Lighthouse, especially in this densely humanly populated chapter, is never a pointed, definitive moment, but a closely

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sensed, yet amorphous ambience: a clustering welter of feelings, events, figures and thoughts in which the characters, collectively or as solitary individuals are immersed. The present consists of something that has just been said or done, someone’s response to it, or something about to happen. True to Bergsonian form, the narrative is always a kind of immediate, circulating memory of itself – a creative time – which validates the sense in which the present is an act. The present is an act in which we participate, and which would not exist without our participation. This finds supreme culmination in the dinner party, Mrs Ramsay’s final and creative act, which as soon as it is concluded, is banked in the vault of time: ‘it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past’ (121). As such this sensory narrative moves vitalistically through time and space, leaving a trail of reference points in its wake, little altering or even touching its subject – as if description is a by-product of its continual and rigorous quest to stay in-between what is going on. The reality it creates is the epiphenomenal by-product of its own mobile trajectory, which is not totally objective, but must be said to be ‘more’ objective than one which issues from a fixed standpoint, because of its multiple reference points. Becoming also relates to some instances of highly fulfilling mystical or spiritual experiences, those that, in another work, Woolf famously termed ‘moments of being’.27 As I have suggested, becoming is a practice of consciousness. We find many instances of this practice in Woolf’s novel, especially with the women, who are apt to periodically ‘harvest’ fuller and more ontologically profound experiences as if both an industrious and uncertain rhythmical life (and text) is yielding these experiences to them. These passages tend to mix elements of spiritual, philosophical, feminine, unconscious, mystical and epistemological questing. There are many of them in the first chapter; indeed ‘The Window’ is composed of a succession of moments of becoming that swell through the text, each moment creating a more fertile textual path for the next. These moments are focused chiefly through Mrs Ramsay, Lily, and the Ramsay children. Mrs Ramsay’s sunset meditation is perhaps the most memorable and commented upon instance of becoming, or a-subjective consciousness, in which, she feels that ‘all the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others’. The intoning quality of the opening of this meditation – ‘To be silent; to be alone’ (69) – draws the narrative tone down to another

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depth as if all the more minor metaphysical singularities, effects and rhythmic imbrications of the text, such as we have been observing, are being consolidated. Mrs Ramsay is clearly putting what Deleuze and Guattari would call her ‘molar’ self aside, because it is a peripheral aspect of being, an ‘apparition’, which ‘now and again’ rises ‘to the surface’, and is therefore secondary to this sphere in which individual subjectifications do not exist. She is journeying into the region of what Deleuze and Guattari would see as an ‘autoproduction of the unconscious – the unconscious-as-orphan, the playful unconscious, the meditative and social unconscious’, a state in which it is not hampered, but functioning in accordance with the boundless affirmation and productivity that are its nature. 28 Mrs Ramsay’s free exploration contains its pitfall however, namely, an encounter with the mythical religious structure that has been injected artificially into her psyche, put in place to hamper desire. Hence her unprecedented statement: ‘It will end, It will end, she said. It will come, it will come [ ... ] we are in the hands of the Lord’ (70). In Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking such a belief is typical of the psychic ‘furniture’ of the western Christian subject of which God is an inevitable safety net. Mrs Ramsay has sufficient self-presence, however, to realise that such belief is a false symbolic impasse, put in place to capture desire, hence: ‘But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean’ (70). The falsity of the religious designation for Deleuze and Guattari is because the unconscious ‘knows nothing of castration or Oedipus [ ... ] of parents, gods, the law, lack’ and because ‘what counts is not parental designations, nor racial or divine designations, but merely the use made of them. No problem of meaning, but only of usage. Nothing original or derived, but a generalized drift.’29 By nature, desire desires to go beyond any such religious configuration, which always points towards a transcendence of actual experience. Woolf’s novel is more of a philosophical method, a process of becoming, than it is ‘story’. The novel’s process of becoming-woman (both of the actual women and the book) falls into two stages, the first is Mrs Ramsay’s and the second will be Lily’s. Whilst Mrs Ramsay has shown the way for the micropolitical activity, Lily must realise it. I will now turn to the second chapter of Woolf’s novel, in which the novel deepens and expands its propensity for becoming, by loosening time and narrative from their human context, and releasing them into a global, cosmic realm.

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‘Time Passes’: the autonomous narrative As previously noted, Woolf’s novel anchors itself in the space of the holiday house and its island surroundings for all of its three chapters. In so doing the narrative reinforces what it has been hinting at from the outset – that it itself is a subject, a materialising surface or interface from which everything arises, dissolves into, and recurs – what I am calling in a manner after Deleuze a material ‘intuition’. Nowhere more than in the novel’s central section do we feel the narrative as impersonal force or interface of nature, insofar as significant human events, such as deaths of characters (Mrs Ramsay included) are relegated to mere parentheses. The human mediations of immanence, transcendence and becoming of the first chapter are now replaced by the destratifying and material proliferation of nature, in the depiction of the abandonment of the house. Thus it is here that the narrative becomes truly autonomous, and its focus inhuman and expansively global. This central chapter confirms and follows on from the conclusion ‘reached’ about time in the first chapter: that there is no temporal present as such, so much as ontological presence. In this event, the present is an entirely human construction. The richer our ontological presence, the richer our qualitative experience of time, and our sense of eternity. Time is both qualitative and quantitative in this respect, and not homogeneously calculable as has been the traditional practice of thought. With the complete withdrawal of human presence in ‘Time Passes’, the narrative turns its pragmatic mode of philosophical enquiry onto itself, and is free to pass into the next stage of its intensive journey into univocity. In keeping with the ubiquitous three-stroke rhythm of the whole novel, ‘Time Passes’ falls into three main parts: the enquiry as to the nature of time, the full usurpation of the house by nature, and the redemption of the house in the form of the regenerating forces of Mrs McNab and Mrs Bast. There is an initial probing of time: ‘but what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon’ (139), which relates to that most human of constructs – homogeneous time. It is here at the start of the chapter that the traces of the departed human consciousness are felt and articulated in these quantifying questions. The homogeneous enquiry continues, and the summer house is questioned insistently by various forces of nature as to its physical longevity: ‘when would it fall? [ ... ] How long would they endure?’(138). In this way, the non-human text is ceremonially heralding itself and its theme before it goes on to produce a temporal vision that completely subverts conventional narrative norms. The theme of

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time then shifts into metaphor (a strong device of this non-human chapter and of Woolf’s metaphysical experimentation more generally) and becomes the ultimately calculating subject, the croupier: ‘night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers’ (139). Again, the narrative is performing its active (pragmatic) philosophy by modulating through time: time is both the (self-examining) mode of enquiry, metaphorically embodied, as well as being instrumental in the removal of the human and the agent of narrative progression that brings about the erosion of the house. Time is absolutely dynamic: both the form and content in this respect. Of course this review of, and challenge to, homogeneous time was not exclusive to Woolf’s work, but part of the wider developments in philosophy and phenomenology of that period noted before, those pioneered in the work of Bergson. For the latter, as I indicated earlier, homogeneous time (and space – because they presuppose one another) are specifically human constructs and together form the chief quantitative and calculating frameworks of rational thought, in the capacity of which they ‘attribute to space and time an interest which is speculative rather than vital’.30 This is an approach which greatly denatures experience, argues Bergson. Mr Ramsay’s transcendence and disconnected speculation embody this approach to time, in the event of which, claims Bergson, time simply ‘flows onward, indifferent and void, external to all that endures’, and in which we accord our perception the status of ‘instruction addressed to pure spirit, as having a purely speculative interest’.31 Yet, Bergson claims, we are wrong in this respect, when really perception is primarily our perception of our own body and its capacity to act in the material world. Indeed all perception, including the brain and intellect, is merely the measure of our own (indeterminate) action on the outside world, of our own potential for action. For Bergson, as for Mrs Ramsay, our important seeing and consciousness is through our bodies and senses, as much as it is through our eyes and intellect. Mrs Ramsay’s listening is already a sophisticated model of perception, insofar as not only were time and space interfused in it, but a reflexive intelligence of its own perceptual action was already pre-inscribed in its own functioning. The damaging result of the rationalistic denaturing of experience is nebulously registered in this central chapter as the event of death: the First World War. The philosophical ramifications of this are enacted in the recurring trope of ‘the mystic, the visionary’ (143) and the sleepers who walk on the beach at night. These figures symbolise the distinctly modernist disillusionment and loss of faith or belief in the existence of

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‘some absolute good, some crystal of intensity [ ... ] which would render the possessor secure’ (144). Human perception, which is imaged as ‘those mirrors, the minds of men [ ... ] those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds forever turn and shadows form’ (144) becomes, in the event of war and death, recognised as illusory, fallible and therefore falls from grace, hence ‘the mirror was broken’ (146). Interestingly, Bergson offers an extremely similar metaphoric model to Woolf in which perception is ‘the effect of a mirage’, or the result of an ‘impeded refraction’.32 Perception is simply the event of the material world’s reflection of itself within us, and thus it is that ‘everything [ ... ] happens for us as though we reflected back to surfaces the light which emanates from them, the light which, had it passed on unopposed, would never have been revealed’.33 Similarly the sleepers walking the beach at night in the novel realise that the dream ‘of sharing, completing, finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence’. The event of war brings this knowledge painfully home to them, and makes it impossible to ‘marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within’ (146). The loss of Romantic innocence means that, in this event, nature too falls out of grace, thus: ‘Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, condoned his meanness, and acquiesced in his torture’ (146). It is the era of (Nietzschean34) ‘bad conscience’ and lack of faith. This important motif of the sleepers enacts the sense in which the war at best forces western civilisation into a process of self-realisation, of a greater consciousness of itself. Yet the sleepers do not really find an answer and they are later implored by an anonymous voice of ‘beauty’ to ‘accept this, be content with this, acquiesce and resign’ (155). One might deduce also that what the sleepers suffer from is the privileging of a humanist and spiritual over a mechanical interest in nature. The Romantic practice of sentimentally worshipping humanity and natural beauty without at the same time partially perceiving them in mechanical terms, and the overt emphasis on what Mary Anne Gillies describes as ‘art’s “spiritual” content’ seems, in the ‘organic’ context of war, as fallacious as pure rationalism.35 Consequently it is the text itself that tries to compensate for this human limitation by providing the alternative of its own becoming or autopoesis; the text attempts to ‘know’ the body of the world and civilisation in its whole perceptual action. The text becomes a multiplicity (a Deleuze-Guattarian ‘machinic phylum’36), a symphony

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of material and cosmic forces, or Bergsonian ‘pure perception’37, which is an anarchic proliferation of pure difference. House and nature form a rhizome by way of an ‘aparallel evolution’.38 Hence: ‘Let the wind blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawing-room, and the thistle thrust aside the tiles’ (150). Deleuze and Guattari claim that it is this manner of unprecedented propagation and events of coupling between heterogeneous entities (here both man-made and natural) that are the authentic activity of the life-force driving evolutionary destiny. ‘Aparallel’ evolutions are machinic forces which do not just trigger change, but which determine the changing nature of change itself. They are the ‘unnatural participations or nuptials (that) are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature.’ Propagation occurs by ‘epidemic’ and ‘contagion’ and ‘involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous [ ... ] That is the only way Nature operates – against itself’. Hence Deleuze and Guattari offer the concept of contagion as an alternative theory of growth to the conventional model of ‘filiation’ and ‘heredity’, the arborescent, Darwinian model. They see the latter as structured to reveal a largely continuous, homogeneous vision of evolution, in short, structured as a model that will minimise difference. A theory of contagion, on the other hand, is alert to the accidental nature of genetic mutation, the event in which ‘bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes’, and each mutation is unique, never to be repeated. Nature is a complex force of becoming in this respect, both natural and unnatural; it works through dysfunction (the machine breaking down), as much as through functionality.39 What ‘Time Passes’ is ultimately showing is that it becomes immaterial to semantically differentiate between time, or nature or even space because in reality – that is, in practice – they are metaphysically commensurate with one another, and are inextricably mixed in duration. In duration, time and nature are the same, a qualitative force. But in organic representation and thought, time, space and nature come to delineate negatively quantifying and qualitative modes of measurement, and are forced to exist separately, in artificial separation, just as in organic forms of human organisation, like marriage, problems arrive because of strict categories. Hence the issue is finally one of the limits of representational convention: insofar as for us humans the very term ‘time’ connotes homogeneous repetition (insofar as it is quantified in space), and the term ‘nature’ implies a qualitative disjunction between ourselves and it. Such terms, which belong to the (pre-Deleuzian) organic values of the first stage of modernism, are in fact outmoded, and must be replaced by

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other models of thought and perception. It is these new perceptual models that Woolf’s narrative is starting to configure, here and in the whole novel, by way of its own technical and rhythmical processes. These processes move the text further towards the univocal vision. As if in a final consolidating of its own machinic dimension, the inhuman narrative of ‘Time Passes’ marks its own most dramatic turn by reflexively turning on its own processes, through what I call a ‘feather-event’. The feather-event is a metaphor the author uses to bring about a change in rhythmical direction, and I use the term ‘event’ here in correspondence with the Deleuze’s complex concept of an event as an incorporeal, non-existent, yet entirely real, ‘impassive’ entity.40 Thus it is a feather-event, because the feather is both metaphorical and actual, both vital and mechanical – it is another singularity or metaphysical ‘moment’. The feather is the novel’s tiniest line of deterritorialisation of all, and yet narratively it is the most axiomatic, insofar as the very continuation of the story occurs by dint of it. It is the point at which all the deterioration of ‘Time Passes’ ceases, and renewal commences. Hence: now had come that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles and night pauses, when if a feather alight in the scale it will be weighed down. One feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness. (151) The feather is an example of the index for the scheme of things in which the micrological can greatly influence the macrological – in which tiny measures of energy determine enormous effects. So claim Deleuze and Guattari, ‘every fiber is a Universe fiber’.41 Hence we are told that had the feather fallen, if it ‘had tipped the scale downwards, the whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of oblivion. But there was a force working ...’ (151); and so the journey of renewal begins. The feather-event implies therefore that the eventuality of life and death or of creation and destruction hinge on relatively arbitrary factors. There is very little obvious reason in life (as Mrs Ramsay knew); no reason as to why some things happen (the feather dropping), and others don’t (the feather not dropping). All we can do is to live our lives as a series of unprecedented singularities, as a series of creative presents. For Deleuze and Guattari it is that no one not even God, can say in advance whether two borderlines will string together or form a fiber, whether a given multiplicity will or will not

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cross over into another given multiplicity, or even if given heterogeneous elements will enter symbiosis, will form a consistent, or cofunctioning, multiplicity susceptible to transformation. No one can say where the line of flight will pass.42 All that matters is what does happen – the actual event. The weight of reason is as heavy (or as light) as a feather. The feather-event renders the house and the story ‘rescued from the pool of Time’ (152) and there is a change in rhythmical direction. For Deleuze and Guattari it is entirely characteristic of rhythm to change direction, and also for ‘drying up’, ‘death’, and ‘intrusion’ to have rhythm – death is part of life.43 Life is composed of countless of these unprecedented directional changes, in the manner of the sea. The whimsicality of this tiny event on which the whole novel hinges conveys Woolf’s humour. The feather-event is her explicit ironical comment on narrative centrality, structure and continuity: it is both a meaningless event, and yet insofar as it is a plot turn on which the narrative continuity relies – a crucial change of direction in the flow – it is mechanically indispensable and highly significant. Although it is the characters of Mrs McNab and Mrs Bast who restore the house, not the feather, Woolf needs this unprecedented feather metaphor to stylistically steer her story out of the nihilism of this central chapter and in fact the text does not credibly flow without it. The feather-event is a synecdoche for a more general facet of the author’s style to which I have been drawing attention: one which relates to the distinctly mechanical ‘heart’ and ultimate subservience to the necessity of structure in her work generally, which she is making no attempt, both here and elsewhere in this novel, to hide. The feather-event is entirely concordant with Woolf’s structural tactics generally: it is barely perceptible on the narrative plane, but nonetheless present and no less axiomatic for being so minute. Hence the feather-event is not just mechanical but, again is, like the thematised proliferation of nature in this chapter, a machinic gesture insofar as it connects the book, a literary machine, with the reality of all structures and machines, what Deleuze and Guattari term the ‘mechanosphere’. The feather-event is a playful, because barely perceptible, reminder of the importance of the tiny (microcosmic) parts of the production, and of the fabricated, artificial nature of any production. The feather-event explicitly reveals the text’s triumph over the more limited dichotomies of the human sphere. What is important is that whilst Woolf has been concentrating so far on building and developing a mechanical aesthetic practice, the feather-event is another, albeit subtle,

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complementary gesture of a theory of the mechanical which supports and validates the mechanical practice. The feather-event is an expression of the author’s double-edged wish to turn a scientific, atomised, scrutinising, relativised and impersonal lens to life (and thus uphold the theory of relativity), whilst also honouring life’s randomness, contingency, spontaneity, vitality, and singularity. In this event there must be a way to marry (scientific) reason with randomness and the free inhabitation of space, rather than a reason that tries to delimit and control space. The means, of course, emerges as artistic practice, as the next chapter of To the Lighthouse explores.

‘The Lighthouse’: aesthetic autonomy I have suggested previously that there is a kind of multidirectional music continuously building and variegating itself within To the Lighthouse, and that the book functions as a large sensory organ/ instrument, producing and responding to its own sounds. In the same way that Mrs Ramsay hears and responds to sounds like the waves, the book also works off its own resonances, which it develops through counterpoints. In the first chapter the oppressive male presence functions as a counterpoint to the spatial experience of women and children. In the same way, the second chapter of the novel is placed in contrast to the first, just as the parentheses that coldly and abruptly announce tragic and important human events in ‘Time Passes’ form a contrast to the main body of narrative in the same chapter. In the third chapter the counterpoint is a combination of (Lily’s) memory of the holiday a decade previously (the first chapter) with the sense of loss and the resonance of death from ‘Time Passes’, as set against her present experience of trying to paint a picture. In this way the third chapter of the novel, ‘The Lighthouse’, melds the achievements of the first two sections: the dynamism of spatial consciousness, which has lost its oedipal framework, is channelled through the inhuman, material medium of art. There are three (unsurprisingly) central accomplishments in this chapter which occur in sequence: Lily overcomes her conflict about Mr Ramsay, the two youngest children and their father embark on the lighthouse trip which was planned a decade previously but never undertaken, during which they reconcile their mixed feelings about him, and Lily completes her picture of the Ramsays, started years previously. The setting of ‘The Lighthouse’ in the greater physical space of the bay, in addition to the holiday house and grounds, engenders a new

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psychological dynamic. Issues relating to space, distance, and transversal transformation here become paramount, in a process of overcoming what Lily recognises as ‘the problem of space’ (186). Space has now shifted from being intensive to being external, tangible and something which remains to be qualitatively inscribed upon: space is both abstract and concrete, it offers itself as machinic third term, a marriage of opposites. The external counterpoise of Lily on land and the three Ramsays in the boat brings about a new emotional dynamic, inhering in Lily’s realisation that ‘so much depends then [ ... ] upon distance: whether people are near us or far from us’ (207). For the Ramsay family in the boat, it is similarly the qualitative space of distance which has ‘an extraordinary power; they had been swallowed up in it [ ... ] they had become part of the nature of things’ (204). Woolf uses the bay as an arena and the journey across it by the Ramsay boat (a movement that occurs between two significant physical points – the island and the lighthouse) to trigger powerful relational and perspectival transformations. With Mrs Ramsay gone comes the imperative for renegotiation: for Lily to positively reconcile herself to Ramsay and the masculine principle and for the two youngest children to redefine themselves in relation to their father. In this chapter, through memory, answers are provided to questions that were posed in the opening chapter of the novel. Hence the novel is reconciling and validating the empirical epistemological enquiry concerning an alternative model of knowledge based on deferral, sense/ intuition, and immanence (as opposed to transcendence) that has been occurring throughout. As Mrs Ramsay knew, and Lily comes to know, wordless relationships can be the most profound. Earlier Lily yearned to know the contents of Mrs Ramsay’s soul, and now the paradox is that those contents are revealed in their imperceptibility, as Lily comes to realise that Mrs Ramsay was ‘glad [ ... ] to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships’ (186–187). We have arrived at the second stage of becoming-woman, in which Lily is in receipt of the deferred knowledge. Lily’s memories are so powerful that they dictate an almost physical rhythm in her consciousness and indeed of the text itself. Because it is now Lily who is the principal creator, in almost every paragraph in which she features we find three-stroke repetition of phrases and clauses. The emphasis is on synthetic realisation, hence: ‘For really, what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing – nothing that she could express at all’ (159), and ‘she wanted to say not one thing but everything [ ... ] about life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay’ (193). The music of the text, which has been produced by

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the three-stroke rhythm, comes to a symphonic resolution in this chapter, with Lily connecting past moments to present experiences. The third stroke is (Lily’s) memory, which effects a fusion of space (the first chapter) and time (the second) that is duration itself: it enacts the healing of the unnatural disseverment of time and space by rationalist practices. The third stroke is not only a stroke of renewal, but also the point of reference aside from life and death. The third stroke is thus of desiring-production, as that which collapses all binaries. Therefore in this last chapter art becomes not only a revelatory and celebrated force and practice, but axiomatic to the metaphysical journey the novel has been following: expressing the liberation of the psyche from social and sexual limitations, and also a new marriage of the spiritual and the material – the consolidating gesture of the machinic.44 Once more the text becomes a literary machine, but this time one that incorporates a third term – a character – and by modulating through painting, rather than music. Thus a tripartite relation (a machine) forms between the author, Lily, and the act of creation itself. This tripartite, machinic gesture is also a strong feature of The Waves and mediated through Woolf’s envoy in that work, the poet Bernard. In its status as a ‘third’ term, art becomes the culminating and transformative gesture of externalising a theory of the mechanical which the novel has been both subtly explicating and intensively building towards throughout by way of its mechanical practice. It is this balance between theoretical and pragmatic mechanical gestures, which, as I will later reinforce, set Woolf on a positive aesthetic course for machinic integration of organic and mechanical forces.

Conclusion As I have interpreted it, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse stands as a kind of novelistic ‘workshop’ of poetics and metaphysics, which sets all sorts of machines and deterritorialising impulses into play, and which dynamically involves the reader in its virtual consciousness. The first chapter of Woolf’s novel, ‘The Window’, paves the ground for machinic exploration, and for the opening of consciousness (both human and narrative) towards autonomy, by experimenting with immanence and transcendence, becoming, and the in-between. ‘The Window’ presents us with a comical yet technical thematic play of transcendence and immanence, of male/female, of the bonds of family, of social life, and more perniciously of religion through a picture of the Ramsays and their guests. On a philosophical level these humanly determined aspects of

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experience thoroughly reveal the limitations of their own oedipal frameworks and point thereby towards a dismantling of the constrictive structures that are normatively installed in the psyche of the western subject. The text reveals the relative falsity of binary distinctions, and with a focus on male and female, suggests that far from being at the centre of life and vitality, this duality contains the potential for becoming transcendent and for stifling life through its own (abstract) organic and mechanical nature, evidenced in its tendency to fall into regressive paradox. Yet there is a ‘becoming-woman’ force issuing from both the text and the female protagonists that works towards a generalised machinic transformation, in which both text and women practice a consciousness with positively coexisting organic and mechanical tendencies. The persistent textual pragmatics and the wave-like movements of impersonal becoming experienced by the women enrich Woolf’s effort towards construction, in human and text, of a-durational perception in which time and space are vitally fused, in a manner after Bergson. The second chapter, ‘Time Passes’, develops the journey of autonomy and dynamism initiated by the first. The text becomes the agent of time, by further destabilising the homogeneous constructs that prevent us from living in duration, and accelerating time to expand the novel’s metaphysical vision into global and inhuman realms. The narrative becomes a virtual vortex of time and nature in which the two terms become virtually indistinguishable from one another; a composite of that which is cruel and yet limitlessly wondrous and unknowable. With the event of the (parenthetically reported) death of key characters and of the First World War, the novel’s philosophical imperatives seem all the more insistent in this chapter. The text implicitly calls for perception to confront its own internal flaws (such as those that produce war) and bring about the structural shift that the novel has, in its own way, been gesturing towards all along. In a wider sense this is a call for civilisation to become reflexive and deepen its knowledge of its own technical construction, its own intrinsic dimension. Thus the text turns rigorously on itself and its own technical and structural imperatives and we are offered a ‘feather-event’: a comical revelation of both the technical paradigms and the balance of chaos and reason at the heart of Woolf’s narrative and vision, and of all the forces of life in which a positive ending is not guaranteed. The third chapter ‘The Lighthouse’ completes the becoming-woman process of the text by compounding the metaphysical achievements of the first and the second. In this context the human and the material find a healing compromise through memory and art as liberation from

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previous limited psychic structurations. Being has been restored to time and space and now space and time are free to extend in qualitative and quantitative symbiosis in the form of the trip to the lighthouse and in artistic practice. Hence the text becomes a fabric of relational and artistic potential. True Deleuze-Guattarian ‘pragmatics’ have been achieved in this chapter: there is a reconciliation between the author and her text through the artist figure Lily and a pragmatic convergence between the text and art in general. The artistic emphasis brings to the text full resolution; it is the third stroke in a novel defined by its search for autonomy and a force of production that arises out of the energy generated by the two tendencies or directions of experience, as Bergson understood them, which shift life from a state of limited duality to a dynamic duality, and thence to a multiplicity. The desire for balance between duality has all the while been implied stylistically in the complex blend of mechanism and ethereal poeticism of which Woolf’s text is composed. The text has been engaged in pushing the two terms of many composites, ‘beyond the turn’, by way of her narrative method, in order to show their participation on the singular univocal plane. The novel moves its subject matter – its organs (its ideas about and picture of humans) from a relative state of extension, which is reflected in the internally disjunctive (binary) state of these ideas and pictures, to a state of greater ‘intension’, or integration. To the Lighthouse successfully challenges the human form of the novel, by introducing a mechanical element into it, and thus by engaging in a machinic practice. Woolf retains the human (organic) ‘content’ of her novel, but radically transforms this content with implicit and explicit mechanical gestures. In this way she moves her human content, or practice harmoniously towards a mechanical age, to move with evolution. Woolf’s narrative ‘workshop’ of To the Lighthouse is a preparation for her future metaphysical experiments – Orlando and The Waves – and for the vision of univocity, of which the latter represents the fruit. Now let us turn to the metaphysical journey of D.H. Lawrence, whose univocal vision – although emphatically more material and both more and less abstract in the tools used – is highly similar to Woolf’s.

3 The Visceral-Materiality of The Rainbow

In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse the metaphysical journey consisted in a loosening of the binary conditions of consciousness in order to make way for a machinic practice of art and an autonomous consciousness. Surprisingly, to think about Lawrence is to ask a similar question. Although their unique modes of literary ‘science’ are formulated differently, on a fundamental level, in their striving to reveal machinic processes in their writing, Woolf and Lawrence are companions. Like Woolf, Lawrence’s project of liberation of the novel consisted in a review of the conventionally human structures of sociality, narrative, and thus more abstractly, of the egotistical and oedipal psychic structures which hold them in place. As I have been arguing, the ultimate goal of this process was to clear the path and make way for a more cosmically expansive and univocal vision, one that would liberate consciousness into nonoedipal autonomy, and include an apprehension of the material and mechanical dimension of life. In the context of the larger literary trajectory of each author therefore, we can see Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and To the Lighthouse in a comparable light: all these novels at once explore and ceremonially dispense with their own oedipal context.1 Hence the Deleuze and Guattarian lens which we applied to Woolf’s Lighthouse – which viewed the inhibiting egotistical boundaries imposed on the unconscious as defined minimally by the family, and maximally by God – is no less applicable to Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, insofar as each text traces these psychic boundaries and their ramifications. The protagonists of Lawrence’s novels Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, Paul Morel and Anna and Ursula Brangwen, are all at various times agents of a fastidious theoretical dismantling (deconstruction) of their received religion. Yet religion in Lawrence is neither as straightforward nor marginal a topic as it is in relation to Woolf. The author’s strong 54

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personal Christian heritage is reflected in The Rainbow: in the strikingly biblical tone and style of the earlier sections, in a rigour and didacticism of theological debates, and in what Gãmini Salgãdo doubly identifies as the novel’s preoccupation with generational (as opposed to individual) time, and with the theme of salvation. Indeed Salgãdo likens The Rainbow to the Old Testament where an individual is measured according to his or her ability or failure to maintain a bond with God. He argues that, in much the same way as in the Bible, characters in Lawrence’s novel are not measured according to their capacity to be ‘successful, happy or even “good” [ ... ] but ultimately whether he or she honours or betrays the bond with life, with the deepest springs of being’.2 Just as strong in Lawrence was the impulse towards dispensing with Christianity in order to make way for his own religious vision of life. Thus the adherence to conventional Christian markers and processes in The Rainbow speaks in a complex way of the tenacious importance of religion in Lawrence’s psyche, as much as of a certain dispensing with it on his part, and then again only a dispensing of the Christian content of religion, and not its emotive or symbolic power, which Lawrence would continue to live in his life and writing. The Rainbow reflects this struggle: it is a novel of intensely religious tenor and substance in which the author transmutes the power and character of received religion into his own ontological/pantheistic terms. The logical fibre – if not the outer characteristics – of this pantheistic vision are much the same as Woolf’s. In the same way as Woolf sought to map a spatially and temporally expanded consciousness and subjectivity involved in dynamic processes of becoming, Lawrence was scientifically attentive to an exploration of the dynamics of Being and of the complexity of its relationship to the world. Yet in a way contrasting with Woolf, his modernist machinic emphasis might be said to be material, rather than perceptual.3 Lawrence’s tactic was to write viscerally; to write the psyche and the world from ‘inside’ itself as if it were a fleshed body. Woolf on the other hand, as I have already suggested, wrote from the spatiotemporal standpoint or interface of sensory perception itself; from the world as a simultaneously self-perceiving and a perceiving thing, in contact with itself through rhythm and sound. But again, like Woolf, Lawrence crafted his unique brand of literary spiritualism on the basis of a de-Christianised psyche. His materialist ontological emphasis was his form of compensation for God’s death, so to speak, through the inscription of nature and human life with a potent, profound spirituality. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari praise him for this very reason: for a literary immanence that is also an ability ‘to

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de-oedipalize even nature, even landscapes’ and create a ‘pantheism of flows’.4 Thus the Spinozan heritage of Deleuze and Guattari is no less applicable to an understanding of Lawrence as it is to Woolf; the former also sought univocity in his vision. Lawrence’s univocity is consistent with the general understanding of univocity that we have been tracking in this book so far: that consists of a fluid and dynamic link between the multiple and the monistic. Also, like Woolf, Lawrence’s work was enriched by the wave of interdisciplinarity of the era and his comprehensive awareness and study of developments that attended it, for example in philosophy, psychology, science, Futurism and, arguably, theosophy. This was the era of radical developments in psychical and psychological research and of the forging of connections between literary and occult circles, in which, like many other avant-garde writers, Lawrence was involved. One of his most striking responses to this exciting intellectual climate consisted in the formulation of a unique literary intuition: the ‘allotropic’ technique. This technique was Lawrence’s experimental way of overthrowing the egotistical and moral exigencies of humanism embedded in conventional novel writing. It was especially in the realm of sexual and love relationships that Lawrence felt the most platitudinous and dualistic conceptions of human nature abounded. Hence his work sought to overturn normative organic concepts of relationships, and what he saw as the spiritual and emotional restrictions contained within them. These included his hatred of what he perceived as the Christianised, ‘spiritual’ character of love between modern man and woman, in which men and women create false sexual attachments to one another by way of their conscious, ‘bullying’ will, rather than from their primal subjective self.5 One of Lawrence’s principal objectives in both his novel and polemical writing was to work against what he saw as the false separation of the spiritual life from the ‘animal’ instincts of humankind, such as were propounded in Freud’s thinking. In his appropriation of the scientific concept of allotropy, Lawrence sought a pathway to a deeper, non-binary level of being and concept of human behaviour. The OED classifies allotropy as ‘the ability for the same element to exist in two or more different forms’ and in this way Lawrence formulated the allotropic style as ‘another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element’.6

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As I will presently show, Lawrence took the rudimentary structural terms of this concept, which consisted in the symbiosis of the mutable with the changeless (or of the relative with the absolute) and used them as a (Bergsonian-style) composite or polarity. He went on to fashion an entire novelistic metaphysic around the polarity. The allotropic analogy found its principal springboard in the context of Lawrence’s interest in Futurism, spurred by F.T. Marinetti’s call in his 1912 work, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, for the development of an intuitive ‘physiology of matter’ (Lawrence’s translation from the Italian) over what Lawrence saw as the ‘old-fashioned human element’ in the arts.7 Yet there is critical consensus that the actual source of the allotropic analogy came from a work by turn-of-thecentury poet and psychical researcher F.W.H. Myers, as is suggested by Thomas Gibbons.8 Myers was a key proponent of the Society for Psychical Research, an organisation that was strongly active in the investigation of the paranormal, and had, notes Suzanne Raitt, both ‘respectability and public profile’.9 At this juncture we would do well to pause and briefly consider Myers’ work, both to draw parallels with Lawrence’s thought and to gain a sense of these unique occult-scientific influences that were circulating in this intellectual climate. It is not easy, in the space of a few lines, to do justice to the import and complexity of Myers’ vast two-volume work, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, first published in English in 1903. This complex work encompasses a vast range of topics surrounding psychic activity. These include the investigation of different psychic states (including the abnormal and paranormal) such as sleep, hypnotism, trance, genius and possession, and the conclusive suggestion that all these states are interconnected. Myers substantiates his theories with enormous amounts of empirical data, and is explicitly reluctant to refute the findings of science, preferring to explore and supply what he perceives to be missing from scientific accounts.10 In its time, and arguably still, his work poses an extreme challenge to orthodox thinking on these subjects, and interestingly, has been largely ignored in intellectual history. Myers’ work, which is an eloquent fusing of the technical and the literary, doubtless exerted a strong influence on a thinker such as Lawrence who was seeking ways out of normative concepts of the human. Roger Luckhurst argues that it was Lawrence’s hatred of Ouspenskian mysticism or Freudianism that made him reliant on Myers’ terms for psychical states because ‘these shared his disgust of mechanical or reductionist accounts for more dynamic, inherently

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metaphorical language’.11 The principal motivation behind Human Personality was, as the title suggests, a formal speculation on the possibility that the human spirit could survive beyond bodily death. Thus in it Myers paints a picture of a consciousness beyond the margin, of a ‘more comprehensive consciousness, a profounder faculty, which for the most part remains potential only so far as regards the life of earth, but from which the consciousness and faculty of earth-life are mere selections, and which reasserts itself in its plenitude after the liberating change of death’.12 Gibbons makes the case for two central points of influence of Myers’ concepts on Lawrence. He links Myers’ idea of a ‘subliminal self’ with Lawrence’s ‘radically-unchanged element’ and the former’s ‘unitary consciousness’ with the latter’s ‘old, stable ego’.13 The most obvious determination of Myers’ ‘unitary’ or ‘comprehensive’ consciousness’ in The Rainbow is the generic impersonal mode of being running through successive generations of the Brangwen family, that causes them to re-enact certain key experiences of their forbears. But unlike the first edition of Human Personality used by Gibbons, a slightly later edition (1907) of Myers’ work lyrically embellishes these ideas: of different levels of the self, and of the energetic and the evolutionary context of this activity. Whichever edition of Myers Lawrence read (which remains unrecorded), the later material has great resonance with Lawrence’s allotropic vision and ideas, and indeed is useful for the picture of energetic activity I am attempting to construct in this book. Myers’ conception of the individual soul as ‘absolutely beyond our present analysis’14 would have struck a welcome chord with Lawrence, who also exhorted the essentially unfathomable nature of life.15 Myers also conceives of the individual psyche as ‘inheriting from earthly ancestors a multiplex and “colonial” organism – polyzoic and perhaps polypsychic in an extreme degree’.16 The notion of something that is at once ‘profoundly unitary’ and ‘infinitely composite’ sounds allotropic (simultaneously changeable and changeless); there is a being or soul ‘colonial’ in its singularity, and yet also ‘polypsychic’ – composed of multiple, inherited psychic processes. The subliminal consciousness or soul, claims Myers, originates in a ‘spiritual or metetherial environment; which even while embodied subsists in that environment; and which will still subsist therein after the body’s decay’.17 This notion of the metetherial spirit echoes Bergsonian and Deleuzian ontology: it sounds highly similar to the plane of immanence, that field of activity on which actual forms have molecular and eternal existence, even while they are embodied on the earthly, transcendent plane.

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But Myers’ account is also important for his location of specific, localised processes in a wider evolutionary and ‘cosmic’ context, which no doubt, would also have resonated with Lawrence. He writes: of late years we have realised more and more fully upon how shifting and complex a foundation of ancestral experience each individual life is based. In recapitulation, in summary, in symbol, we retraverse, from the embryo to the corpse, the history of life on earth for millions of years. During our self-adaptation to continually wider environments, there may probably have been a continual displacement of the threshold of consciousness; – involving the lapse and submergence of much that once floated in the main stream of our being. Our consciousness at any given stage of our evolution is but the phosphorescent ripple on an unsounded sea.18 It seems clear that Myers is trying to think of psychic processes as a complex blend of historicity and materiality which causes the local to resonate with the universal, and which therefore is a possible key to apprehending the forces that shape human and natural evolution. In effect, Myers is seeking ways to think of evolution not in teleological, but in univocal terms. Undoubtedly it was far-reaching, lucid accounts such as Myers’ that inspired Lawrence to formulate a complex vision of psychic and evolutionary process in his characters and narratives, processes which, as I will show, he infiltrated into the mechanics of language. But Lawrence’s convergence of science with language, what is known as his ‘allotropic technique’, must also be seen as part of a wider climate of scientific scepticism in which, as is comprehensively documented by Jeff Wallace, thought and language themselves were beginning to be understood as a form of materialism. Wallace explores how through emergent developments in philosophical and scientific pragmatism and relativism of that era, as propounded by thinkers like William James, Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel, the ‘thinking’ of matter became identified as a struggle located within language itself and thus as indivisible from linguistic questions. This struggle in language, argues Wallace, provided Lawrence ‘with a model of an “alert” science in which a reverential approach to nature and materiality [became] inseparable from a sense of the fragile provisionality of knowledge’.19 This evolved into Lawrence’s uniquely rhetorical and experimental style of writing and thinking such as is found in much of his non-fictional work, in which many of his attempts at theoretical and moral frameworks are made. Thinking scientifically,

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and reducing natural and life processes to a simple dualism of the changeable and changeless, opened up a whole new world of novelistic metaphysics for Lawrence. As in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, allotropy as a machinic textual practice is rhetorical: it operates on levels of theory and practice. On the theoretical level, the bare term, along with Futurism, provided the inspiration for Lawrence’s introduction of a radical material-chemical vocabulary into The Rainbow. This chemical vocabulary was one especially striking effort in the move towards depersonalising and dehumanising the novel. Yet it is the very explicitness of the chemical theme that is also its relative limitation in the context of the novel. Far more important, in my view, is Lawrence’s pragmatic machinic use of the dynamic polarity of allotropy, on the level of narrative technique: his insertion of this mechanical element into his narrative practice. It is this technical dimension of the metaphysic that has been the focus of the bulk of critical response to the technique. Many Lawrentians have explored the way the allotropic technique works through hermeneutic interchangeability, in which two opposite terms or two (or more) meanings of the same term are put through a repetitive and oppositional play, that reveals them as formed of the same ‘material’, and which point therefore, towards univocity. Jack Stewart, for example, studies the way in which a word such as ‘knowledge’ in Lawrence’s novels, carries an ‘extraordinary burden of transvaluation’ and acts as a ‘nodal’ point for the novel’s dialectics.20 The allotropic technique works by putting not just words and ideas – but characters and narrative too – through the same processes: through continual and intense cycles of transmutation, transfiguring, therapy and nativity, in order to bring word/character/text/world to a new condition or level of experience. The technique is all the more remarkable for its holistic effect; for working on multiple textual planes of text and narrative, from local (grammatical, syntactical, hermeneutic), to larger ones (characters, events, philosophical import). In this way, allotropy is a kind of textual becoming which puts heterogeneous things together and generates becoming and ‘aparallel’ evolutions by way of these conjunctions. Indeed in his novel writing and his wider thinking, Lawrence tends to work through disjunctive juxtapositions and dynamic, elemental composites. The most fundamental of these is his belief in the axiomatic forces of attraction and repulsion as those that underlie the forces of life.21 He frequently places a set of attractive and repulsive terms (or others following the same laws) in an experiment that pushes them ‘beyond the turn’: he places terms in a dynamic, frictional contest that catalyses other

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transformations and intensities in the text. In this capacity, Lawrence is well versed in machinic processes. It is these physical and autonomous qualities in the allotropic technique, which lead to my designation of Lawrence’s machinic emphasis as a predominantly visceral or material one. Allotropy represents Lawrence’s self-styled pragmatism that is tested within narrative: literally the bringing of scientific technique to narrative, which has led Garrett Stewart to call the technique a ‘verbal science’.22 Yet apart from Garrett Stewart’s admirably technical, albeit one-dimensional analysis of the technique, there are surprisingly few involved readings of Lawrence’s complex, somewhat incalculable allotropic style in the context of the larger body of his work. Stewart himself alludes to this critically uncharted territory in Lawrence’s work in describing the allotropic technique as staging its own ‘self-mediated debate, with implications far beyond the limited linguistic purview of a writer’s craft’. Stewart sees Lawrence, moreover, as ‘the most polemical of the great novelists, and hence the most deeply rhetorical, more deeply than has yet been thought’.23 Yet Stewart’s study does not elaborate on what these deep implications might be. Where these accounts of allotropy fall short is in addressing the universal and evolutionary implications of Lawrence’s technique, those that far exceed the local context of the novel, and which clearly drew fuel from the backdrop of thinkers such as Myers. An exception to this is Michael Bell, with whom I will engage later, who invokes the ‘supra-personal’ evolutionary journey of The Rainbow, by looking at the function of time in the novel. Although The Rainbow covers a span of about 60 years, the novel is actuality implying the stages of several thousand years of civilisation.24 Bell argues that Lawrence’s narrative technique allows him to compress a large amount of evolutionary time into a small space, and thus to mediate a significant quantity of historical information in a qualitative, as opposed to a quantitative manner. It is by way of the narrative metaphysic that Lawrence is very much rehearsing his own version of the temporal crisis of modernism: by surveying all (recorded) time and by writing a diachronic genealogy of civilisation and a history of its consciousness. Thus I will make it my task here to probe allotropy in Lawrence as a ‘universal’ phenomenon – to seek what Lawrence ‘meant’ by the technique in a broader sense. This is a task which calls for Deleuze and Guattari, whose theory can assist in explaining the ‘mechanics’ of evolution for which Lawrence’s novels search. The evolutionary patterns and meaning of The Rainbow occur in a series of shifts, and it is these shifts, which again, critical work on Lawrence seems to have sensed,

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more than analysed.25 Within this process, there are three (generational) stages that are often invoked in critical accounts of the novel. Martin Price describes the tripartite sequence of cultural stages in terms of three states or of consciousness: the ‘blood-intimacy’ of the early Brangwens, the more complex, conflictual married life of Anna and Will, and finally the characteristic modern life of Ursula, with its ‘loss of traditional beliefs and refusal of traditional roles, both its yearning and its arrogance’.26 There are clearly different languages demarcating these shifts at work within The Rainbow, which suggest the real processes of evolution that Lawrence was struggling with in the modernist period. Deleuze-Guattarian theory gives us the means for providing a clearer account of these stages and their social and novelistic ramifications, and thus the tools for diagnosing the modern as the ‘universal’ product of these three different stages of civilisation. The three states of social life in Lawrence’s novel, in my view, correspond to Deleuze and Guattari’s three social ‘machines’ or formations which have made up human civilisation to date: the ‘primitive’, the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘imaginary’. We might also venture to say that these three large-scale transhistorical machines in both Deleuze and Guattari and Lawrence are the concrete translation of what was metaphysically distilled by Woolf into three strokes of rhythm, explored in the previous chapter. For Deleuze and Guattari, the fundamental production in life is of desire, and the principal objective of any social formation is to code the flows of desire. Each era, for Deleuze and Guattari, delimits a different mode of socio-economic production or of the ‘coding’ of the flows of desire. They argue that the primitive or ‘territorial’ socius is defined by an immanent system of economic-flow exchange, insofar as the flows of desire are coded or ‘territorialised’ on the physical body itself in a production that circuitously links the body to the earth. The symbolic or despotic (feudal) era is one in which the flows of desire are coded onto a transcendent principle – the despot, God, and the signifier or system of representation. Rather than being vitally connected to the earth, this social machine makes a deterritorialising step away from that of the primitive and, for ‘the first time, something has been withdrawn from life and from the earth that will make it possible to judge life and to survey the earth from above’.27 The position of transcendence marks the genesis of organs and the process of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘overcoding’. Overcoding denotes the capacity to extract a code from something to stand in place of that thing. Overcoding is always a deterritorialising move that creates an increasingly ‘paranoiac’ socius. The final ‘imaginary’ or capitalist era is that which engenders

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the greatest independence between the activities of the production and consumption of the flows of desire or life, by subjecting them to a radical ‘decoding’ or deterritorialisation. I will explore these three stages, both in the context of The Rainbow and in the following chapter of this book, in terms of their different combinations of the organic and the mechanical – their different formations of the machinic. The symbolic middle stage will be seen as a bridge between the primitive and the imaginary, containing elements of both regimes. All in all, I will suggest ways in which the allotropic technique is Lawrence’s way of ‘intuiting’ the circuit of intrinsic reciprocity between life and its functionality – the nucleus of its changing relation to itself over time, that I have seen as crucial to the direction and vision of Deleuze and Guattari. The generational passage of The Rainbow loosely suggests the journey through these three social machines: the novel moves from a primitive culture, and thus away from the earth, into a symbolically ‘overcoded’ and hierarchically driven environment, thence into the mechanical domain of industrial and intellectual surveillance. In To the Lighthouse the terms of the tripartite journey and the massive cultural shift into the modern condition of civilisation they represented, were metaphysically framed, and consequently a lot more abstract. Lawrence tends to confront concrete historical forces much more directly. My reading of The Rainbow and tracing of its allotropic patterns will focus on different, salient areas of family and individual life which present themselves as the most intensive sites of psychic and determining activity. These include love and sexuality, time, the inhuman, gender and the critique of modernity, and Ursula and subject formation.

The primitive metaphysic of The Rainbow The Rainbow is an account of the childhood, courtship and partnership of three generations of the Brangwen family against a socio-historical backdrop which marks the transition from pastoralism to industrialism, but which also infers a supra-temporal time-period. Critics have tended to classify this movement as from a subjective (primitive) mode of civilisation to an objective (modern) state of consciousness, and many have commented on the significance of The Rainbow’s relation to the historical-temporal crisis of modernism. As I see it, Lawrence’s novel marks an attempt at negotiating this modernist cultural shift by expanding the perimeters in which history is constructed, in order that history encompasses universal and cosmic dimensions. Hence the nostalgic pastoralism of the early part of The Rainbow in a novel that ‘aspires to

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the condition of myth’,28 represents the innermost core of social ‘health’ in the series of ‘widening’ circles of family and generational development that constitute the whole book. The strikingly biblical opening account of the early Brangwen family is a microcosm of the whole first half of the novel: the passage completely encapsulates a pre-industrial mode of life of deep connection to the earth: But heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease? They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds’ nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and inter-relations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it. They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees, they harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand on the bridle-rings, drew the heaving of the horses after their will. (9–10) This passage, much remarked upon, is a microcosm of the novel’s entire metaphysic. It is a passage of pure (Deleuzian) becoming between text and rustic environment. This machinic reciprocity between text and depicted environment is contained in the multiplicity of different flows and things in the passage that are linked through rhythm and action. This writing is an example of what Garrett Stewart describes as the ‘lunging, unstable dynamic of Lawrence’s style’, which replaces ‘a mentalized portrait’ and observations ‘rationally derived or dialectically arrived at’ with a ‘visceral rhythm that is the furthest development in English of the Romantic rhapsody’. Stewart describes the motion of this technique as the ‘thrust, swerve, and conversion of imagery’.29 In the technique, we can see that the flow of the human being is one in a multitude of others – animal, seasonal, meteorological, vegetable and domestic. The bodies of the Brangwen men are in physiological union

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with nature: ‘they felt the rush of the sap in spring’, and the ‘sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels’. The technique enables Lawrence to render different elements enigmatically interchangeable in the continuum of action. Hence, the rain being sucked up in the daytime seems related to the sunshine being drawn into the breast and bowels, whilst the undesignated ‘nakedness’ which follows it, would seem to refer to the human body of breast and bowels which preceded it, until we see that it is also a nakedness that shows the birds’ nests no longer worth hiding. The ‘thrust, swerve and conversion’ in the text is a principal action of an allotropic narrative, which effects its transformations on a tangibly material level. The repetition in the phrase ‘the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men’ has the effect of placing us within a little duration of dynamic, ceaseless action. It is the feature of Lawrence’s allotropic style, in its dense passages, to charge a certain phrase with the immanent physical force and meaning of the whole (here the microcosm of a passage which is a microcosm) and this image of the men milking the cows is one such example: the heavy, physical incantatory sounds of ‘pulse’, ‘blood’, ‘cows’ and ‘hands’ beat on one another in dense proximity. The sentence is a pure Deleuzian intensity and machinic assemblage: the machines of the men and the machines of the cows engaged in interlocking productive activity.30 The effect of this univocal vision is to present life as a singular ‘body’. The use of rhythm in this writing differs from the more drawn out poetics of Woolf. The self-absorption of Lawrence’s rhythmical phrases is more immediate and visceral, each phrase marking an individual assimilation and a transformation, as opposed to, as in To the Lighthouse, a string of clauses deferring a single resolution. The writing therefore enacts the wholly immanent circuit of production and consumption (‘of desiring-machines’) that is the mark of Deleuze and Guattari’s primitive-territorial socius, and that inscribes the territorialising processes and flows of desire through bodies onto the ‘full body’ of the earth. It is this system that is commensurate, as Deleuze and Guattari imply, with the most liberated or ‘polyvocal’ state of the flows of desire, which has the greatest proximity to the ‘real’. The mythologising in the above passage communicates a yearning for lost polyvocality, or the freely dispersed flows of a primitive way of life. There is a sense of extraordinary completeness about this world, in which all beginnings, all endings and all processes are both contained and acted out. These people are not only in an immanent circuitous connection with the earth, but with the cosmos. This circuit between them and the cosmos is not abstract, but as tangibly visceral as their

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earthly, farming life: their very bodies interact with the cosmos. In the striking scenes surrounding the birth of a child as seen from the husband’s point of view, which occur later, Tom Brangwen feels a ‘great scalding peace went over him, burning his heart and his entrails, passing off into the infinite’ (77). Deleuze and Guattari’s idea that the primitive social machine codes its social flows on the organs of the body seems to be implied here. Through his body, Tom takes his place in a cosmic order, and finds himself in direct contact with the conditions of life (allotropic changelessness), as well as the transient forces of change and difference. In this context, eternal knowledge is embodiment, a function of corporeal participation. However, right from the outset of the novel, Lawrence establishes an alternative logic in this idyllic picture. Although the men form a vital circuit with the earth, and in a ‘blood-intimacy’ with farming life, the women face ‘outwards’ and watch the actions of men such as priests, who are not farmers but who ‘set out to discover what was beyond’. The woman looks to see ‘what man had done in fighting outwards to knowledge’ (11). In sum, Lawrence presents the women as initiating a process in which the immanent circuit of production of the farming collective will gradually be replaced with the linear progress of civilisation, that is also a movement towards greater abstraction of education and knowledge; in short, the mechanical age. The linking of women to the progress of civilisation is a continual and explicit theme in the novel, which intensifies with the advent of modernity. Like Woolf, not only is Lawrence using a mechanical aesthetic practice, but is also offering (although not quite so overtly as Woolf) a theory of the mechanism, which enhances the overall sense of evolutionary inevitability of a mechanical age. This supposedly female impulse towards abstraction (thus mechanism) gathers increasing momentum in The Rainbow and is reflexively reinforced by the consistent allotropic language and its implicit ‘vision’ of universality. Yet before civilisation shifts into this different mechanical gear, there is still much cyclical, intensive primitive life to unfold, the ‘machines’ of which we will proceed now to look at. The significance of the male/female relationship is central in Lawrence’s novels. Lawrence endorsed a polarised male/female relationship, a relation of vital separateness, in which each party is sustained as an intrinsic mystery to the other. There is the suggestion in The Rainbow that the pre-industrial era was more conducive to this sort of relationship. Hence the first generation of Brangwens are ‘two very separate beings, vitally connected, knowing nothing of each other, yet living in their separate ways from one root’ (15). The following passage of the

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courtship of Tom and Lydia suggests the mysterious potency of love in the pastoral era, and liberally uses the allotropic literary technique to convey it: Then, as he sat there, all unused and wondering, she came near to him, looking at him with wide, grey eyes that almost smiled with a low light. But her ugly-beautiful mouth was still unmoved and sad. He was afraid. His eyes, strained and roused with unusedness, quailed a little before her, he felt himself quailing and yet he rose, as if obedient, and as if obedient to her, he bent and kissed her heavy, sad, wide mouth, that was kissed, and did not alter [ ... ] Again she came to him, as he stood in his black clothes, with blue eyes very bright and puzzled for her, his face tensely alive, his hair dishevelled. She came up close to him, to his intent, black-clothed body, and laid her hand on his arm. He remained unmoved. Her eyes, with a blackness of memory struggling with passion, primitive and electric away at the back of them, rejected him and absorbed him at once. But he remained himself. (46–47) This excerpt, like much of the text, is distinctive in its wave-structure: there are waves of integration and of pulling away between the new lovers. There is a deliberate vagueness to the description, that plays out the primitive, semi-consciousness of this generation, but the vagueness also conveys a sense of the dense, tangibly physical relationality of people in this era: we are given the ‘in-between’ of the lovers’ exchange. The characters are given – not for what they are in themselves – but for what they are to the other, hence Tom is ‘unused’, and Lydia is ‘unmoved’. Placed in the same passage, these words balance/echo one another, suggesting an economic relation between the lovers that remains to be activated. The description of Tom’s eyes ‘strained and roused with unusedness’ is a characteristically opaque Lawrentian rendering of emotion: not a finished description of a subjective state, so much as a dynamic unfolding of emotion that partly releases its dynamism through its very vagueness for the reader. This deeply affective writing arises from neither the agency of the characters, nor from our intellectual participation, but as in Woolf’s narrative, happens in the space prior to agency – a visceral, collective space. As readers we receive the affect before we receive the intellectual reality of what is said. The words are in vital communication with each other: the phrase ‘quailed a little before her, he felt himself quailing and yet he rose, as if obedient,

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and as if obedient to her, he bent and kissed her heavy, sad, wide mouth, that was kissed’, not only self-builds through the obvious repetition, in the same way that Tom musters the energy to approach Lydia, but with each new clause subtly disrupts our sense of time – hence ‘quailed a little before her [ ... ] he felt himself quailing’ – with the result that we feel as muddled as Tom. Words themselves are not hermetic, individualised units of meaning, but only mean in relation to one another: they exist in a plasmic collectivity of inference and association. They are machinic. Each short paragraph in the excerpt advances the process of integration, of the lovers coming closer to one another. The last paragraph achieves the intensity the previous few have been building towards, by effecting a transition and opening in Lydia. The black-clothed body of Tom suggests a sexuality which will be directly echoed later in a depiction of his son, also black-clothed, but under less harmonious circumstances. It is characteristic of the metaphysic of this writing to use a linking image like black (for his clothes and her eyes) to evoke the sense that blackness is a code for something deeper and more incalculable. Black is used as a dynamic quality that puts body and eyes on a single (univocal) plane of substance. The significant point of intensity of this passage is: ‘her eyes, with a blackness of memory struggling with passion, primitive and electric away at the back of them, rejected him and absorbed him at once’. The blackness of his body is consummating with the blackness (of her past) inside of her, and she is undergoing a transformation. The rejection and absorption in her eyes is a muscular flex of attraction and repulsion – the core energy dynamic mentioned previously, around which so much of Lawrence’s work is structured. Like Woolf’s style, this rich writing has great reverberative aftereffects: generating an implicated body of activity, or metaphysical charge, which exceeds its localised positioning in the text. Also, like Woolf, Lawrence makes use of a cyclical rhythm in his narrative. The accounts of the marriages of the first two generations unfold the narrative’s dense cyclical metaphysic, what Erwin R. Steinberg calls the ‘widening spiral’ structure of The Rainbow, which ‘expands as it opens’.31 The two chapters entitled ‘The Widening Circle’ further enunciate this structure. Narrative progression is entirely contingent on these alternate cycles of love and conflict in the relationship, hence of Anna and Will’s partnership: ‘it went on continually, the recurrence of love and conflict between them. One day it seemed as if everything was shattered, all life spoiled, ruined, desolated and laid waste. The next day it was all marvellous again, just marvellous’ (155).

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In the second generation of Brangwens (Anna and Will) the relationship is cyclical, but shows the clear transhistorical shift into the despotic-symbolic social machine that I suggested previously. As we see above, the metaphysic is more explicit and the narrative voice ‘harder’ and more rational. Hence, ‘it was all marvellous again’, signals that both the narrative and civilisation have come further into a state of mental consciousness. This is in contrast to what we saw in the previous generation, where the language was playing within the liminal, vague area of sense and meaning, just as characters were more anonymously cast, and words were in a vital, plasmic relation to one another. With the earlier Brangwens, there was more of a character ‘mapping’; they were gestured, rather than represented, characters. But it is more likely that we will be told something about Anna and Will that would only have been inferable with Tom and Lydia – the narrative is bringing them to the surface and personalising them. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the despotic-symbolic social machine is characterised by the arrival of a transcendent principle – the despot, God and the signifier – to codify the flows of desire. Correspondingly, the second generation of Brangwens presents us with a distinctly autocratic social climate, as exemplified in the strong focus on Will’s religious belief, and the subsequent defeat of this belief within his competitive and hierarchical marriage, as implied in the note of (Anna’s) derision in ‘it was all marvellous again’. For Deleuze and Guattari, the despotic-symbolic is a machine of paranoia, and correspondingly in this second generation there is a neurotic and overdramatised element in the language and characterisation: in the constant marital struggles, in the objectification of feelings, and in the insistent, repetitive and formed (as opposed to diffuse) symbolism.

Sexual and temporal rhythms There are two more rich centres of allotropic activity in The Rainbow: those relating to sexual and temporal concerns. In general, The Rainbow is suffused with the active power of sexuality, which can not only radically reconfigure the individual, but acts as a narrative index or energetic monitor of the state of relations between characters. Marianna Torgovnick praises the novel’s ability to capture the rhythms of family life in its narration of a sublimated sexuality. She notes a subconscious attunement in the Brangwen family and the sense in which every change in a sexual relationship affects a wide circle of those characters around it.32 She argues that the section in which Anna and Will

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intensify their sex life has a ripple effect on the extended family, and catalyses the change in tone at the farm described in a later section. This also includes a change in Tom Brangwen, who ‘as he grew older seemed to mature into a gentleman-farmer. His figure lent itself: burly and handsome [ ... ] Things had puzzled him very much, so he had taken the line of easy, good-humoured acceptance’ (224). This marks the narrative point at which Anna and Will have formally succeeded Tom and Lydia through establishing a new centre of vital activity, of which a sexual connection (necessarily) comprises the core. In this respect, sex is posited as a highly sensitised and complex force that acts rhizomatically to modify the whole family dynamic. Anna and Will’s sexual primacy reinforces their narrative primacy. In this textual metaphysic it is not entirely possible to separate sexuality, time and the emotional life – they are all part of a singular force. This is a very DeleuzeGuattarian vision of the operation of sex, quite different from a psychoanalytical oedipal sexuality, which is constructed as shameful and internalised.33 Torgovnick’s astute observation of the ‘cascading effects’34 of the sexual union is consonant with the philosophers’ idea that our loves and sexuality are the ways in which our libido is unconsciously and molecularly invested in the social field. One of the great Freudian mistakes of Western culture, they contend, has lain in our anthropomorphism of sexuality. Lawrence criticised Freud and psychoanalysis for their erroneous treatment of sexuality on a number of interrelated accounts: for falsely installing incest complexes in the unconscious, for setting up sex as a mental idea, and for attributing a sexual rather than a religious or creative motive as primary in all human activity. Such distortions, he believed, contribute to the large-scale distortion of the unconscious and thus of the moral faculty in Western society. Deleuze and Guattari took up Lawrence’s phrase ‘dirty little secret’ in their own anti-Freudian argument, using it in Anti-Oedipus in support of their own project for the liberation of the machinic unconscious.35 In reality, sexuality is profoundly non-human, as Lawrence presents it in his ‘pantheism’ of narrative flows. His portrayal of sexuality in marriage, particularly in connection to animal and creature imagery in The Rainbow, emphasises this. Tom and Lydia’s bond is ‘strong’ and ‘dark’ and they have ‘a potent intimacy that existed inarticulate and wild, following its own course, and savage if interrupted, uncovered’ (99). But again, in accordance with the shift in the social machines noted previously, Tom and Lydia’s bond is more creaturely than animalistic and deliberately left undefined as such, whereas Will and Anna’s bond is explicitly animalistic. Will has the quality of a ‘black cat’ (200),

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a ‘harsh, penetrating call’ (201), and he can ‘see with his gold-glowing eyes his intention and his desires in the dark’ (200–201). His wife learns to respond to this, ‘to his black, sensual power, that was hidden all the daytime’ with a ‘curious rolling of the eyes, as if she were lapsing in a trance away from her ordinary consciousness’ (201). The primitive bond between Tom and Lydia is a third term or relation that is external to them as individuals (‘transcendentally empiricist’, in Deleuzian terms). Their bond is seemingly free of anthropomorphic tendencies and therefore inhuman in the healthiest way. Anna and Will’s bond, on the other hand, is restricted to the duality of them as two human reference points (a relation which is purely in the dual terms) and is therefore (oedipally) interdependent. Ultimately this confinement of life within human terms suggests the gradual process of internalisation of the forces of desire within the ‘privatised’, bourgeois individual, moving civilisation towards the modern age. The primitive couple’s bond, however, is turned expansively out towards the cosmos. Sexuality is the final catalyst of the gradual yet enormous transformation that occurs in Will in his young adult life. After a brief flirtation with another woman, Will’s intense mystical aestheticism is as if transferred from the church to his wife’s body, in which he discovers ‘supreme, immoral, Absolute Beauty’ and ‘all the shameful things’ in their ‘sinister, tropical beauty’ (220). This sexual liberation gives Will ‘scope for new activity [ ... ] of a kind for which he was now created and released. He wanted to be unanimous with the whole of purposive mankind’ (220–221). Likewise for Deleuze and Guattari, sexuality and love can contain a ‘revolutionary’ tenor, an idea that finds expression in various ways in Anti Oedipus, but most lyrically in the following description of our tendency to always make love with worlds. And our love addresses itself to this libidinal property of our lover, to either close himself off or open up to more spacious worlds, to masses and large aggregates. There is always something statistical in our loves, and something belonging to the laws of large numbers.36 For Deleuze and Guattari, our loves are ‘statistical’, because they are the ‘molar’ manifestations of the molecules of desire, which in large numbers amplify themselves into the aggregated forms constituting the social field. Because desire drives all forms of life, the way or style in which people love, and make love, is paralleled in the way in which all forms manifest in a social field, the way in which the world is

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constructed in all its ‘economic, political, historical, racial, and cultural determinations: in delirium the Libido is continually re-creating History, continents, kingdoms, races, and cultures’.37 This is suggested even more strongly in Ursula, for whom sex is a powerful tool of selfdefinition and emancipation from a set of social expectations. In a novel that covers such a large scale of time, time is handled in an innovatively unconscious way in The Rainbow; it is completely embedded in the same univocal metaphysic as sexuality. Michael Bell argues that it was Lawrence’s fundamental scepticism of modern selfconsciousness, and its symptom, the ‘formal self-consciousness of modernist art and writing’, which caused him to refrain from any overt thematisation of time. Time in any other form was for Lawrence an obfuscation of and dishonour to the immanence of integral being.38 Lawrence’s conception of Being consisted in immanent duration: a complex of emotional, psychological, spiritual and mental phenomena, from which no temporality could be extricated. He was deeply critical of the self-conscious stylistics of writers such as Joyce and Dorothy Richardson, attacking them for stripping ‘their smallest emotions to the finest threads’ and for being ‘absorbedly self-conscious’.39 For Bell, time in The Rainbow is rendered through palimpsestic structures that mediate lesser or greater compressions of subliminal time through subtle alterations in the psychological posturing of characters in their relations. He uses the scene depicting Tom and his stepdaughter Anna’s mutual enjoyment at collecting household objects for her coming marriage as an example. Bell argues that Tom and Anna’s uncharacteristically oblique perception of each other signal a process of their growing separation that was taking place over a period of at least a few months.40 Hence Tom’s vision of Anna, ‘her hair was like bronze, her apron white and cheerful’ and Anna’s perception of him as a ‘shadowy presence’ (123). This is not time in the abstract sense, but the singularity of ‘a’ time, as in ‘the time when ... ‘; time that is indivisible from the powerful emotional dynamic which it mediates (duration). It is time already in its mnemonic form. The scene carries with it the quality of recollection and a certain thin, uncharacteristically cinematic unreality, because it signals that a period of vitality between father and daughter is passing. Time in the early part of The Rainbow is in-built, never allowed to become conscious, and is part of the material fabric of both Brangwen life and narrative. All in all, the allotropic aesthetic acts as a synthesiser that enables Lawrence to evoke an extremely holistic picture of rustic life and its flows. Lawrence’s allotropic language in The Rainbow is just as technical

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as Woolf’s aesthetic. Yet the technicality of the medium is always subservient to Lawrence’s dominant motivations to serve and to value the human. The two novels of Woolf and Lawrence that have been covered so far in this book are comparable in their implicit values and practices. They find authentic machinic becoming in human activity; they show us the machinic life in humanity. Yet simultaneously they challenge these same human organic forms and the theories that attend the forms. Both writers thus imply an ethical ambivalence about the human sphere and the validity of the becomings within it.

The inhuman-corporeal The Rainbow has complex ways of rendering the vast cumulative shift from an organic to a mechanical state of society and of passing judgements on the shift. The technical seamlessness of the allotropic technique enhances the evolutionary inevitability of the shift and thus enables the novel to move from primitivist to modern values. Yet there is another dimension of the allotropic aesthetic, centred in the characters’ bodies, which implies the moral dubiousness of the evolutionary shift. This corporeal order enacts a continuous inhuman quality in the characters. In Lawrence’s allotropic writing an element of inhumanity is rendered as part of the concrete fabric of being. The narrative is thereby encouraging our awareness of characters on a level Deleuze and Guattari describe as ‘below the minimum conditions of identity’.41 The writing goes to some lengths to show us how close we are to unformed, inhuman forces, almost as if they are not hidden deep within us, but can be accessed spectrally, as a function of the frequency or wavelength with which we observe them. In this way the non-human tends to surprise or shock in The Rainbow (a tendency which becomes more intense in Women in Love): it can be a glimpse we have of a character as a primal creature, as for example, in the portrayal of Lydia’s ‘ugly-beautiful’ mouth which she holds ‘with a strange, primeval suggestion of embrace’ in her courting with Tom (46–47). In this case Lawrence uses a discordant physical description to refract the powerful mixture of sexuality, fear and mystery the woman provokes in the man, as if they two are plastic entities that exist to be emotionally sculpted by one another. The image we are given of Anna, who, upon news of her father’s death ‘pressed back her head and rolled her eyes, as if something were reaching forward to bite at her throat’ (232) is similarly unnerving and recalls strongly the image of her father immediately after his first eye contact with his future wife, who

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‘looked quickly away, pressing back his head, a pain of joy running through him’ (29). In this way, Lawrence’s focus on individual body parts at intense moments is defamiliarising and yet deliberately sets up a physical resonance between the generations. It is another, subtle – yet permeating – incidence of the allotropic style; the ‘single radicallyunchanged element’ passing materially through the evolutionary cycle. Emotional reactions serve to reinforce a tribal collectivity that affirms the Brangwens as one material body. But it is also by way of this technique of physical and corporeal patterning that Lawrence insinuates gradual cultural change. Whilst we can see that for the pastoral characters, healthy patterns of continuity, community, and transformation are expressed through their physical networks of behaviour, in the modern characters individual bodies pathologise a spiritual malaise that itself is caused by a lack of vital and transformative contact with a collective. In this way, the inhuman is also the thematic vehicle through which Lawrence indicates a character’s contamination with modernity, as if the latter is a form of physically registrable sickness. The modern characters – Skrebensky, Tom Brangwen junior and Winifred Inger – all exhibit varying shades of a distorted animalism and materialism. Tom and Winifred’s ingrained scepticism, soullessness and apathy are mirrored in their bodies. About Tom, Ursula notes there is ‘something marshy’, a ‘succulent moistness and turgidity, and the same brackish, nauseating effect of a marsh, where life and decaying are one’ (325), whilst Winifred makes ‘gross, ugly movements’ and has a ‘clayey, inert, unquickened flesh’ like the ‘great prehistoric lizards’ (325). In Skrebensky Ursula realises that ‘the vulnerable, variable quick of the man was inaccessible’, and she could only feel ‘the dark, heavy fixity of his animal desire’ (410). Vitality has been disabled in these people by the subjugation and separation of the emotional, sexual and spiritual sides of life – by the creation of an artificial hierarchy (organic structure) within the subject, in which the head rules. In these modern characters increased intellectualism (i.e., a correlate of their increased social mobility) and corporeal degradation go hand in hand and point towards an evolutionary degradation, which will be explored in more depth in the sequel. By melding the body to a sequence of continuous, ‘timeless’ events in this way, in The Rainbow Lawrence is advancing the body as the great relativistic monitor of its own health or malaise according to its ontogeny in a given social epoch. The spectrum of the inhuman (which encompasses both health and ‘disease’) in the novel is suggestive of an order of

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health that spans the spiritual and the corporeal, and thus is used to focus the shift from the primitive to the modern: of a shift from a body which is vitally integrated to one which is materially subjugated and inert. It is my view that Lawrence’s inhuman expresses his understanding of the two different – positive and negative – states of mind-body duality that respectively precede and follow from Cartesianism. The positive state is that in which mind and body are in an interdependent yet non-hierarchical relation, in which the mind is not given to dominate (even though it has the capacity). The second state internally hierarchises the human organism: the body is subjugated by the outwardly extending mechanical or mental energy (the will). In the latter event, all energy becomes instrumental, as opposed to intensive. The second model implies the movement towards abstract extension (into organs and physical machines) that for Lawrence is synonymous with the movement into modern civilisation. Anyone with a moderate knowledge of Lawrence will be familiar with his diatribe against the modern use of the will that for him was the principal force of extension (in Deleuzian terms, that which creates organs). He saw the will as the accomplice of the mind and idealism, as the faculty that had steered civilisation in a sterile and destructive direction.42 But the first model of positive interaction between mind and body (the positive inhuman) suggests a preferable model of being. In retrospect, I will suggest that this allotropic figuring of the healthy-unhealthy inhuman of corporeal states in The Rainbow provides an early clue to what will emerge as Lawrence’s dominant ideological motivations and views. By way of the first model, Lawrence importantly places the human body as an intuitive monitor of the very forces of life and change (of the margin of potentiality between the intrinsic and the extrinsic)43: the body ‘knows’ evolution, in the same way that the allotropic narrative knows it. But in the context of the dominant narrative current of the novel, this corporeal branch of the metaphysic stands on its own. In the latter half of The Rainbow, Lawrence chooses to suspend an affinity with the human (primitivist) mode of life, and turns towards a valuing of the mechanical.

Gender and the decline of civilisation For Lawrence, the issue of gender was deeply linked to the increasing mechanisation of humankind, and in The Rainbow he uses gender to focus his critique of the negative evolution of modernity. Lawrence felt that authentic male power had long been in a process of diminishment, hence his later ideas of a male blood-fellowship and the assertion of a

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‘phallic consciousness’ in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As men decline and women rise to power in The Rainbow, their relations become increasingly conflictual, and even diabolical, with the advent of the modern epoch. For example, at the end of ‘Anna Victrix’ Lawrence seals the fate of Will, just as he did with his father-in-law before him: ‘He was aware of some limit to himself [ ... ] Something undeveloped in him limited him, there was a darkness in him which he could not unfold, which would never unfold in him’ (195). Whilst Tom Brangwen senior’s permanent underdevelopment was understated, Will’s is made explicit. Although in both cases Lawrence is rather concise in his announcement of the sealing of his male character’s psychological fate, again, like the similarly diagnostic judgements brought to bear on Winifred, Skrebensky and Tom Brangwen junior previously, there is no sense in which we are meant to take these pronouncements lightly, in the light of the novel’s polemical imperatives. To my mind, the force of Lawrence’s apocalyptic sentiments is as strong here as in the letters, treatise, and essays. It is the economy and finality of the announcement regarding Will that betray the author’s deep dismay at a general state of affairs. The narrative is a harsh judge of its characters. This element of competitiveness in the Anna/Will relationship also insinuates the gathering of industrial force that is being mediated on a millennial scale in the narrative background. The section entitled ‘Anna Victrix’ confirms this. As previously mentioned, we see Anna settle, from quite early on in the marriage, for domestic fulfilment rather than a path of self-realisation, hence she ‘relinquished the adventure to the unknown. She was bearing her children [ ... ] She was a door and a threshold, she herself’ (182). She is the novel’s female materialist in the same style – if not activity – of Tom Brangwen or Gerald Crich. She is arrogantly self-believing and given over to a life of maximum productivity – of children. She is the organic turned homogeneously mechanical (a machine of motherhood), and she signals a turning away from the reverence of the family as idyllic, vital collective, just as the lack of independence of the men from their wives contributes to a growing scepticism about the oppressively interdependent structure of the organic family. The ‘nullity’ (305) of Anton Skrebensky, Ursula’s lover, is a still bleaker portrayal of manhood. Moreover, the decay is further along in development in him. We learn that ‘to his own intrinsic life, he was dead’, his life lay only ‘in the established order of things’ and in the ‘great, established, extant Idea of life (304)’. Skrebensky articulates Lawrence’s fierce

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criticism of a society operating by way of intellectual abstractions (organs). Lawrence is commenting on the behaviour of ideas (abstract organs) as instrumental entities in this way – that they behave like homogeneous machines (even if they aver difference). By insisting he is merely a cog in the machine of society, Skrebensky believes he must surrender his individuality for the good of the community. For Lawrence, such a belief is false, because abstractions such as ‘community’ do not pragmatically exist. A system that sees the ‘highest good of the community’ as equal ‘to the highest good of the average individual’ can also only be false and is thus destructive. For the narrator, the idea of community ultimately stands for the ‘material prosperity of all classes’ (305); the idea primarily serves capitalist interests. Lawrence’s dislike and fear of the generalised move towards abstraction that attends modernity, which is represented by Skrebensky, and which was initiated in the forward-looking of the pastoral Brangwen women, is a criticism that the novel (arguably) never abates, even as it moves into an embrace of modernity.

The rise of abstraction I have shown how Lawrence focuses on the bodies of his characters to imply complex machinic patterns of health and sociality that, with the advent of modernity, degenerate in a process attributable to the subjugation of the material (vital/organic) body by the (mechanical) mind. In this way, The Rainbow is mapping and monitoring a vast evolutionary movement of consciousness up and out of the body and ‘into’ consolidation within the head and mind, by way of the three social machines formulated by Deleuze and Guattari: the primitive, the symbolic and the imaginary. The evolutionary movement through these three machines in The Rainbow consists in a process of the advance of a semiotic, verbal culture out of an illiterate, superstitious medieval one, in which the narrative mimics the signifying and interpretative imperatives of a culture increasing in self-consciousness, and assumes a more cogitative and diagnostic stance, as opposed to ontologically vibrating with the ‘deep, inarticulate interchange’ (98) of the initial primitive social life. In the modern sections focusing on Ursula, we arrive in the imaginary machine. Correspondingly the narrative becomes a restless, linear flow of provisional (decoded) events, thoughts, feelings, and projections. Hence at the cost of depth of consciousness – or diminishment of being – comes breadth of consciousness; an intellectual expansion and

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mobility that are the marks of the ‘imaginary’ capitalist machine. For example: Ursula had only two more terms at school. She was studying for her matriculation examination. It was dreary work, for she had very little intelligence when she was disjointed from happiness. Stubbornness and a consciousness of impending fate kept her half-heartedly pinned to it. She knew that soon she would want to become a self-responsible person, and her dread was, that she would be prevented. An allcontaining will in her for complete independence, complete social independence, complete independence from any personal authority, kept her dullishly at her studies. For she knew that she had always her price of ransom – her femaleness. She was always a woman, and what she could not get because she was a human being, fellow to the rest of mankind, she would get because she was a female, other than the man. In her femaleness she felt a secret riches, a reserve, she had always the price of freedom. However, she was sufficiently reserved about this last resource. The other things should be tried first. (310) The whole passage smacks of the modern state of being. No longer naturalist or symbolic, the prose has become dryly factual and calculating: the consciousness both of the book and of civilisation has now ‘reached’ the head. The line ‘she knew that soon she would want to become a self-responsible person, and her dread was, that she would be prevented’ is the most obvious example of a mental ‘metaphysic’: every step contains an element only ascribable to a speculative, detached consciousness. There is conscious, objective knowledge (‘she knew’), future orientation (‘soon’), desire (‘want’), change (‘to become’), autonomy (‘self-responsible’), and rationality and knowledge of possible threats (‘would be prevented’). All is now turned towards autonomy and detached contingency, and away from collectivity and relationality. Ursula’s disapproval of her parents as not ‘quite personal, quite defined as individuals, so much were they pervaded by the physical heat of breeding and rearing their young’ again shows the limitations of the primitive and suggests that it must be left behind (329). The departure from tribalism is an important shift in the novel’s own consciousness, from what was such a powerful, authentic truth of life, to a rationalised exit from it. Yet Ursula is still connected to her natural heritage: that her intelligence is not autonomous (an isolated mechanism), but contingent on

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her emotional well-being, links her to the instinctive life of her forebears. Moreover, the language itself is still working allotropically, making its temporal and psychic transmutations through characteristic repetition: hence, her desire for ‘complete independence, complete social independence, complete independence from any personal authority’ is the microcosmic phrase of the passage, enacting the core metaphysical force, and propelling both Ursula and the text forward. There is a subtle (allotropic) hermeneutic collapse of the two meanings of ‘reserve’: the reserve of her femaleness and the subsequent ‘reserved’ of her feelings that engender a play on the active and passive meanings of the word. Another active/passive play on the word ‘giving’ occurs closely afterwards: ‘So she ground away at her work, never giving herself, never giving it up’ (310). This play on the passive and active is machinic: suggesting an attractive/repulsive tension in life, but also conflating life (active and passive) into a singular substance. The mind has reconciled the difference into a singular, instrumental, individualised ‘substance’. In these modern sections of the novel Lawrence’s language is now enacting the mind in the same way that it enacted the body in the primitive sections. The language is complex: it pragmatically ‘does’ the mind, which means becoming theoretical, because the mind is, and because modern society is. But because this process is mediated through the allotropic language, there is a strong sense in which practice always comes first: in which words and ideas and the mind are secondary effects of visceral processes. The inextricability of practice and matter and words and ideas will become the salient debate in Women in Love. It is a point that brings us to the crux of how the primitive and modern social machines are fundamentally, structurally, different. I suggested before that the interconnectivity of the parts of Lawrence’s primitive Brangwen social machine was a condition that rendered it both an organic and a relatively machinic entity: the subjects (the parts) are in a state of positive, communicative connection, and it is through this connection that they are, to some degree, individually fulfilled. This is in a similar way to Mrs Ramsay, whose sense of connectedness and security in marriage provided the context for her momentary separation and transport into individual becoming. In To the Lighthouse, I proposed this context as one that could clearly be seen to engender a ‘positive passive’ force, such as we observed in Mrs Ramsay, which balanced the positive active (transcendent, male) force. This positive passive force linked to the interaction of the human organism in a network of concrete, sensible life – composed of interacting mind and body.

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But as I have already pointed out, in both Woolf and Lawrence, human becomings are depicted as reliant on these outer organic hierarchical structures; the machinic becoming was only possible because of the structure. In the early pastoral Brangwens, this hierarchical structure is underplayed. But by the second generation, as I have shown, the hierarchy (like in any organism), has started to become more oppressive – as in Anna’s victory over Will and in her childbearing. The hierarchical limitation of Anna and Will’s situation is logically commensurate with Mrs Ramsay’s own shortcomings, namely, the partially duplicitous nature of the latter’s marriage and her personal mortality. In both these cases, the subjects (the machinic parts), become vulnerable to the limitation of their organic hierarchies, and thus both Woolf and Lawrence question the value of the human, even as they practice it. By the end of To the Lighthouse, we can see that Woolf is making steps into a full embrace of the mechanical, as both aesthetic practice and theory. This tactic will eventually give rise to her pure machinic aesthetic form, although it has not been fully achieved at the end of this novel. In Lawrence’s novel, the passage out of organic formations (both primitivism and despotism) into the abstract (capitalist) social machine signals the end of the organic configuration of life, and thus the end of the positive passive (of positive, concrete differentiation). In this context, active and passive become dubious entities, as is reflected in the language of Ursula’s feelings above: opposing meanings ironically amount to the same thing. The reader is left to feel that Ursula’s two contrary feelings are actually one, or part of the general machinic – but this time mentally derived – substance of life. Ursula’s withholding (not giving herself) is also her motivation to work, and both are a function of her mental faculty (her will), not of her body. Her femaleness (her body) is an active reserve (of power), but also one that is the source of her passive reservations – she can exercise the choice as to whether she uses it or not. Both active and passive enact the great reserve of singularised life-force that is available to Ursula – the part (Ursula) of the machine is being brought to a state of greater autonomy. In this modern machine the nature of energy use is again different: not diffuse force spread out in a collective (the first generation), nor force strung tensely between a couple (the second), but individual, singular force which exists to be instrumentalised and theorised. But it is also force that does not now arise from concrete (physical and mental) dynamic duality, but from a negative separation between the abstract and the physical, such as I described earlier. In short, the machinic now relates specifically to the freedom and mobility of thought and will, rather than that of body with

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mind. This signals a (significant) shift from a human machinic to a mechanical, mental one. The life-force is always organised in human beings in some way, and in the modern era, the organisation has shifted its location. The hierarchy has now become internalised within the individual. The machinic relation of the primitive – mind-body – has been replaced with the hierarchical dichotomy – mind over body. Although there have been many expressions of dissatisfaction with the second half of The Rainbow, the novel is making a significant and complex diagnosis of the mechanics of the shift into a mechanical consciousness.44 In the context of Ursula’s life we see the mind – the dominant term – take over, a process that is expressed in terms of increasing abstraction and a linear movement into work, betterment, progress and mental knowledge (the movement that defines modern civilisation). Ursula enters a network of social, institutional and professional mechanisms by way of education, and by gaining a gruelling job as a teacher. Lawrence strongly emphasises the inhuman, mechanical nature of institutionalised experience, hence Ursula’s teaching job is that which forces her to ‘put away her personal self, become an instrument, an abstraction, working upon a certain material, the class, to achieve a set purpose of making them know so much each day’ (356). The development of Ursula’s will is the core concern of these later sections. Ursula ‘hardens’ into mental life and autonomy in a movement that must all the time be seen as culturally symptomatic. Ursula’s will formation begins in childhood and is the product of a defensive process in reaction to her father. Lawrence enhances the pragmatic quality of this process by showing us exactly how it occurs, how the ego and the will are fashioned repetitively, and again, as if materially, out of a defensive mechanism, hence, of Will’s injustice towards Ursula: ‘She did not forget, she did not forget, she never forgot’ (249). That the will is a negatively forged self-production is also clear. We learn that after a particularly painful incident with her father, Ursula ‘came to believe in the outward malevolence that was against her’ (208). In other words, this is a social machine that produces its own demons by installing them early on in subjective development. For Deleuze and Guattari, Freudian psychoanalysis compounded this inward turning of the modern subject by ‘castrating’ desire, or instituting a principle of lack (the Phallus) into the unconscious (the negative passive). Likewise, Ursula suffers the effect of (oedipal) lack at the hands of the male principle (her father). His sense of lack (stemming from the failure discussed previously), and her childish inability to redress it, trigger a process of early diminution in her: a ‘dim, childish sense of her own smallness

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and inadequacy, a fatal sense of worthlessness. She could not do anything, she was not enough’ (205). There are many ensuing signs in Ursula of an internal sense of lack, such as later on when she feels that ‘within herself some recording hand seemed to point mechanically to a negation’ (357). The flows of desire and the production of social life in the capitalist-imaginary do not open out towards the cosmos, but are turned in on themselves, Nietzsche’s ‘bad conscience’. The ‘animal’ (the corporeal, vital, inhuman) of humankind has been subjugated by the dominant mental faculty, a fact that is constantly emphasised in Lawrence’s novel. The organic form of life has come to dominate its vital functioning. These two entirely simultaneous movements: the active, outward formation of the will, and the passive, negative inwardturning, conform to a ‘parallel line’ model of subjectivity and human force – a model that defines the modern age. It is the inward turning movement that ‘economically’ balances, so to speak, the dominant impulse of this stage of civilisation, which is to move actively outwards. This passive ‘inward-turning’ that is characteristic of the modern subject, is different from primitive intensivity because it is primarily an individuating, instead of a collectivising force. As the portrait of Ursula’s life shows, a mechanical society is an effect of the individuating and homogenising processes to which its subjects are exposed from early on in childhood. Indeed the mechanical collective of modern society functions by creating separate, democratically equal individuals who will serve the whole. Ursula’s homogenising consists in her conformity to institutionalised working life, whilst her individual ‘equality’ (rejection of hierarchy) is achieved by her rejection of paternal authority. But we remember that the will is a negatively passive (or reactive) production, produced through lack. The development of a mechanical society, and its increasingly abstract system of exchange, are in this way, the passive effects of machines/wills reacting to each other (in space) in their increasing numbers, and over history (in time). For Deleuze and Guattari, the increasingly abstract axiomatic of exchange constituting a capitalist regime is the logical endpoint of all the preceding social systems: it has neither tangible, nor centralised control, but is a logical effect of an advanced state of history (not a cause).45 The current modern system is an inversion of the whole teleological premise of history and time itself: it is the inverse of history, hence the modernist (and postmodernist) crisis of history. From this point of view of inversion, there is no longer teleology, no such thing as cause and effect, but simply a growing state of abstraction. In order to extract forces of production from the world, this growing principle of

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abstraction must be internalised within the consumers and agents of production on a psychical level, as has been shown with Ursula. In effect, history and economic forces (of power and the ‘infinite debt’) are internalised into individual subjects (as lack). The portrayal of Ursula’s life depicts this process, a society that upholds the principle of instrumentality. The will is primarily an instrument of labour, the capacity for the individual to produce according to the degree of abstraction that is current in his or her stage of the imaginary modern machine. Yet this process of modern subject formation and development of the will is a highly ambivalent phenomenon in The Rainbow, insofar as Ursula’s will is also the key to her freedom. The striking and much commented upon moon scenes are nothing less than a triumphant expression of this sexual and personal freedom. They also represent the most definitive expression of the confluence of ideas articulated in Lawrence’s allotropic letter to Garnett, namely that of the Futuristinspired inception of a modern scientific language into the novel. This finds expression in the chemical and material ‘ “metallic-corrosive” vocabulary’46 that links Ursula to moon ‘qualities’ as she makes love to Skrebensky. She is like ‘glimmering gossamer’ with a ‘brilliant, cold saltburning’ body (298) that is ‘seething’ and ‘corrosive’ (299). Both lovers are linked with metal; she is ‘bright as a steel blade’ (297) and ‘her hands and wrists felt immeasurably hard and strong, like blades’ (298), whilst he is ‘soft iron’ (299). The scene is fatalised to the extreme, hence Anton ‘knew he would die’ (298), his soul ‘was dissolved with agony and annihilation’ (299). Their lovemaking is a bitter contest, in which she triumphs by obliterating his manhood, a victory she afterwards regrets. The scene’s brutal, combative atmosphere also expresses the fictional reality of the Boer war in which Skrebensky was periodically fighting, and the actuality of the First World War which had begun during Lawrence’s writing of the novel. There is a megalomaniac quality in the portrayal of Ursula’s will that is, in my view, deliberate on Lawrence’s part: it implies the force of the greater, highly destructive will of society at large. But this is secondary to the allotropic certainty of this scene, in which both – in this instance via Ursula – Brangwen character and experience remain triumphantly continuous in spite of time and cultural change, and in which the narrative, in a similar way, remains rooted in the fabric of its material metaphysic, in spite of the vast changes it has otherwise been linguistically and stylistically registering. In short, in The Rainbow, the state of modernity and its psyche are finally painted as highly paradoxical. Conformity to the larger social will through work offers Ursula greater

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power and a way out of society’s limited structurations. In this way, the modern working subject is a positive and active machinic, as opposed to a negative and passive mechanical, cog in the machine, because through her working instrumentality, Ursula becomes unreliant on other parts of society. Furthermore, by way of her instrumentality Ursula, like the desiring machines, is engaged in breaking the flows – of others and, potentially the structure of the machine. Hence for all the vindication of modernity and its mechanism, both implicitly in the pastoral sections, and explicitly in the negative modern scenarios, the end of The Rainbow turns towards a positive vision of this society. It becomes clear that the novel has been mustering itself to make an about-turn and to align with the forward-movement that has been an intuition and a growing reality of the whole book. There are continual references to the unearthed potential of Lawrence’s modern heroine, Ursula, to her relative location in an as yet unrealised process that can only be brought about through her volition. Towards the end we learn that she ‘had within her the strange, passionate knowledge of religion and living far transcending the limits of the automatic system [ ... ] but her fundamental, organic-knowledge had as yet to take form and rise to utterance’ (377). What is implied here is that although Ursula uses a mechanical will, the knowledge that waits within her to be developed is not mechanical – quite the opposite. The very term organic here has – at this stage – neither meaning nor definition: it is a blank slate that the book has wiped clean and yet which remains to be developed. We know this new knowledge can be neither the primitive vitality of her ancestry, nor the mechanism of her present life. The organic remains to be created and made in Ursula, both as idea and reality. Ultimately, the intellectually abstracted and aggressive modern persona Ursula currently assumes is a stage she will transcend, and ‘involute’, by way of her individuation process, to the integral Being that lies within her, the fund of knowledge that is her Brangwen inheritance. Thus overall, The Rainbow concludes with a troubled but hopeful stance towards modernity. In this way, the tempestuous final sections of The Rainbow prefigure the concerns of the sequel, in which a bleak diagnosis of the ills of the inorganic mechanical of idealism and self-consciousness is juxtaposed with an advance of its redemptive and revolutionary potential, its capacity for becoming. This about-turn in values concerning the approach to the mechanical and the will in The Rainbow corresponds to a particularly positive stage of Lawrence’s ideological trajectory, which, as I will document in a later

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chapter, involved a struggle into mental consciousness. In short, The Rainbow marks the point at which Lawrence had not completely abandoned commitment to ideality, and at which he was prepared to give modernity the benefit of the doubt. His later experiments, in both the novels and the wider body of polemical work, would concern pragmatic and creative approaches to ideas, and to a process of consciously determined individuation. How far and in what ways this creative mental potential could be realised, how far one can find individual machinic fulfilment in an automated world, or indeed use the freedom ostensibly offered by the mechanical system to alter the terms of the system (e.g., in feminism), or whether these are just machinic illusions generated by the social mechanism, is the subject of the later works, to be dealt with in the fourth chapter.

Conclusion The Rainbow proceeds through a series of stages that present a history of (Western) consciousness, and for which Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the three social machines of a ‘universal history’ provide a fitting analogue. Hence the pastoral sections present a free interplay of the flows of desire in the social life of the early generations of Brangwens. This polyvocal ‘metaphysic’ of desire causes flows of social, subjective and natural life to converge and to articulate the intrinsic, machinic holism of early Brangwen life. I suggested areas of convergence of this metaphysic in the novel consisted in love, sexuality, time, and the inhuman. I showed how all of these facets of pastoral life unfold in a cyclical patterning in which bodies are united with each other, with nature and the cosmos, through local and generational time. The male/ female connection is presented as a metaphysical core of life, imbued with a potent mystery. Sexuality is presented as a particularly binding marker of these rhythmical cycles. The text itself is in service to the corporeal metaphysic of this primitive social machine: time is a visceral intuition of narrative, rather than a homogeneous backdrop to events or a self-conscious technique. Moreover, the language of the novel itself enacts the ‘metaphysic’ of the pastoral life: the allotropic technique acts as a form of pragmatic literary ‘science’ that subjects words and concepts to ceaseless processes of hermeneutic indeterminacy and transmutation that are synonymous with processes being undergone by the characters. The narrative effect of the linguistic science of allotropy is univocal: different things – nature, bodies, time, the individual, form a singular, rich Being.

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In the second generation of the family – which I argued collides with Deleuze and Guattari’s symbolic-despotic machine – the text alters its representational tactics: it gives us the same patterns of courtship and marriage, but through a more enunciated medium and with an increased level of competition between the couple in question. The greater rationality and verbal clarity of this section is commensurate with the diminution of the powerful ontological vagueness and reverberation of the previous generation. Moreover the heightened antagonism in the Anna and Will partnership signals Lawrence’s general belief in an increasing disruption of gender balance, which itself portends a wider social demise. The second generation is emblematic of a social machine that makes a deterritorialising step away from a primitive, vital connection to the earth, by way of the narrative’s psychic consolidation of the couple into more personal beings, by their combat, and through a symbolic displacement onto sites of hierarchical transcendence – firstly that of religion, and subsequently that of Woman (sexual worship). The narrative thus subtly starts to exude the simultaneous outward-forward movement (onto sites of knowledge) and the concomitant negative inward-turning (into the subject) that the advanced development of civilisation brings. There is a shift into the hierarchical parallel line binary model of civilisation, and out of the interdependent collective social model. In this event, as society becomes more disconnected from its vital production, the narrative increasingly acts as a diagnostic reflex of the diminishment of social health that attends the civilising processes. As modernity approaches, the novel starts to strongly attack a society in which men have no vital potency and both men and women act as subservient mechanisms in an oppressive social machine. The third modern generation, as channelled through the heroine Ursula, suggests a shift into the third and final machine of the capitalist-imaginary: a surface production of decoded events, thoughts and ideas that are caught up in a process of increasing abstraction. Through Ursula, the narrative shows signs of a significant ideological shift on the author’s part from primitivism – a valuing of the human – to a valuing of modern ‘mechanical’ values of education and work as necessary tools in the greater project of conscious individuation. This potential for an individual part of the machine (Ursula) to ‘become’ is essentially the point at which Lawrence’s novel leaves off and the trajectory with which it carries us into Women in Love: in a spirit of hopeful self-determinism. If the will suggests the possibility of redemption from itself, then the modern mechanical age might indeed be the site of a new machinic freedom in human consciousness; modernity might be

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the answer. This new consciousness in the individual might all at once include spiritual, instinctive and cosmic components, and would not rely on the interdependence of its members in a collective (either family or society), but would be autonomous. Overall, the allotropic narrative technique thus enables Lawrence to express a complex modernist situation. The Rainbow extended through the three social machines of history, simultaneously binding and differentiating them. This multidimensional history enables Lawrence to negotiate between primitivism and progressive future orientation and to ‘prove’ that a universal quality is already ‘in’ language, human behaviour and destiny. The allotropic technique is a real attempt at intuiting, on Lawrence’s part, the reciprocal circuit of intrinsic-extrinsic activity (the margin of potentiality), described before in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. The allotropic technique is a univocal ‘substance’ or groundless ground (virtuality), which can account for change from the standpoint of change itself, without relying on an external reference point or on the binary logic of representation. It is involution rather than evolution. In this way, The Rainbow implies that change is an ongoing mutation – change changes, and becoming becomes. Allotropy allows Lawrence to ‘become’ with the mechanical age by adding the autonomous element to his own thought – by ‘becoming’ machinic. Like Deleuze, and as we will see, like Joyce, Lawrence uses narrative pragmatics to subvert ideology. But unlike Joyce, Lawrence, for all his mechanical experimentation, never abandons a primary commitment to the human being. The experimentation has merely been a vehicle of expansion of the concept of the human, never a substitution for it. Now I shall turn to Joyce’s epic text Ulysses, to observe this other, less human, mode of negotiation with modernity and a universal history, and the different set of machinic textual becomings that activate the encounter.

4 Ulysses: The Hyperconscious Machinic Text

The journey of this book so far has shown Woolf and Lawrence’s novels as comparable agents of a machinic overturning of the binary terms of history, a process which has indicated what is at stake in reconfiguring consciousness – both local individual and collective – into an open, and possibly non-human system. In the previous chapter I showed how Lawrence’s allotropic technique constructed a machinic vision of history which allowed for contrasting ideas of change and growth to coexist, and which provided a remarkable intuition of a univocal plane of life. The Rainbow showed us how the modern psyche is constructed, and thus might be said to have brought this project to the point of the modern imaginary. Lawrence’s novel also started to ask questions about this social machine. Joyce’s Ulysses is the next, more comprehensive step into the imaginary. In Ulysses we definitively arrive in the modern capitalist era: a literary site in which the precise ‘mechanics’ of modernity and of the modernist shift can be probed. We also arrive at the site of the full-blown operation of a ‘universal’ state of history and being, in which, I will argue, all three social machines and the ‘types’ of social life they engender are in simultaneous operation. Like Lawrence, in Ulysses, Joyce works through the three machines of universal history, but through a linguistic, as opposed to a corporeal emphasis. Joyce tracks the three different ‘modes’ of history – the primitive, symbolic and imaginary – through language. For Deleuze and Guattari, an acknowledgement of history as universal is a view that can only be engaged from the standpoint of the present mechanical social formation – capitalism – in that the latter is an historical mélange of the social regimes preceding it. Capitalism, they argue, is the ‘negative of all social formations’ and ‘the end of history’.1 Indeed the capitalist system feeds off the negative binaries that I have 88

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been showing exist in the organising structures of society. The imaginary machine of the capitalist regime works through a ‘double-bind’ within desiring-production.2 As a novel of multiple representational/linguistic politics, Ulysses all at once contains forms of practice, positive and negative machines, and implied (political) awareness of double actions and binds. The novel testifies to the mechanical engineering of universal history that circulates multiple codes from different historical ages, insofar as the enormous force of these codes’ interaction and competition is carried within the text as a singular vehicle. A ‘universal’ consciousness of history issues from a culture that has arrived at a certain state of historical self-consciousness, a state Deleuze and Guattari after Lacan term the ‘imaginary’. Joyce’s large-scale linguistic emphasis in his novel offers a window on what it means to think this third (and current) imaginary mode of history, largely because in Ulysses language emulates the mechanical nature of modernity; language is both the form and the content of the book, a machine. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘imaginary’ capitalist machine works on the basis of continual flow circulation. This circulation is motivated by the double-action: by converting ‘codes’ from previous social formations into a ‘surplus value of flux’. Thus, they write: Civilised modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other. These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of ‘imbricating,’ of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes, inventing pseudo codes or jargons.3 Each flow is always provisional: the content of the code, fragment or jargon is meaningful (operative) correlatively with the extension of the flow, and then it is replaced with another. The flow system confers an abstract value on its contents, thus everything can be commodified, and the marginal is inevitably – cyclically – absorbed by the dominant because everything must be finally be decoded and utilised. Reterritorialisation in this context is ‘violent and artificial’.4 The imaginary is so-called because it is nothing more than a field of images – reterritorialised from past regimes and shaped and reduced to ‘their Oedipal simulacrum’ in order to serve the machine. Modern cultural life is a fragmented flow of the codes and jargons of the past, both mirroring, and subject to, a monetary economy – a system of

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cultural currency. Thus while capitalism would seem, in its expansive propensity and inclusion of all codes, to be following a model of radical dispersal of the flows of desire – as in the primitive machine – the subjection of all of these flows to the abstract quantity of money (deceptively) renders the system deeply oppressive and stifling of desire. It is debatable whether the mechanical capitalist system does little more than posit the effect of freedom and difference through a circulation of mechanically produced images. In the modern system, machinic life and difference are quantified and endlessly circulated in the abstract mechanism in an, arguably, highly oppressive way. Life in a society composed of recycled ‘neo-territorialities’ takes on a radically artificial and unreal dimension, as key theorists on postmodernist culture have explored.5 But the very term ‘imaginary’ refers to the sense in which one social machine is built atop another in the ‘universal’ history of the capitalist machine. Indeed it is these two social machines – the symbolic and the imaginary – and the pendulous swinging between them, which powers the imaginary of the modern age. Thus for Deleuze and Guattari the social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles [ ... ] born of decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them towards an absolute threshold.6 The oscillation is between the symbolic organic codes of the old despotic machine and its imaginary, mechanical engineering. The imaginary is the operation that causes the old codes to return and to be circulated as oedipal simulacra which modern subjects consume and, for Deleuze and Guattari, falsely live by. This social system, which is the definitive force shaping modern culture, thus consists in an oscillation between the two stages of evolution being mapped by modernism: between the old organic, human mode and the mechanical stage. Although Deleuze himself is a strong proponent of a teleological aesthetic shift from the classical to the modern, he argues together with Guattari that on the social level there is no teleological break from one machine to another, but that modern society is a machine built out of the symbiosis of two successive stages of history. Modernism, with its contrary array of impulses and political motivations, was a particularly heightened moment of cultural

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realisation of this paradox of the linear versus circular state of history; of the shift from history as an idea, to history as a universal machine, containing duplicitous politics. For Deleuze and Guattari deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation are the two great energetic forces fundamentally behind this evolutionary dialectic of the organic-mechanical, which composes the modern machine of history. Indeed everything in the capitalist imaginary is double-edged. As in The Rainbow, Joyce’s Ulysses strongly exhibits the depth of this paradox, by laying social life out on a wholly linear and yet reversible plane of activity. In Ulysses the paradox manifests in the journey the novel takes through language and sense. The text consists in a journey of simultaneous disorder and order: a deconstruction of linguistic and sense and stylistic variation, and a reestablishment of tradition in the enormous intellectual heritage on which the novel draws. Like Lawrence, Joyce binds his univocal text in its journey through a universal history. Through a linguistic emphasis, Ulysses enacts this fundamental paradox of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation that is also the paradox of history. The highly charged tension of this fundamental double-action is present across the board in Deleuze-(Guattarian) thought. Hence the approach to language and writing in Anti-Oedipus in which language, both in its current and possible uses, reflects the duplicitous workings of capitalist paradox. Thus together Deleuze and Guattari contend that ‘writing has never been capitalism’s thing. Capitalism is profoundly illiterate’. Writing, as suggested in the previous chapter, is a product of the social formation preceding capitalism – the imperialistic ‘despotic’ era. In the latter the written word or signifier functioned as a ‘fictitious voice from on high’ and exerted the sovereign power of a transcendent God and the authority of a despotic leader.7 Under capitalism, however, writing is an archaism; it has been divested of its former power, just as monarchical rule has also become archaic, and religion no longer a dominant force. In this context, for Deleuze and Guattari, language and representation are little more than tools of the imaginary. Under capitalism, representation is functional; it ‘no longer relates to a distinct object, but to productive activity itself’: it is mechanical. Under capitalism, in the manner of all cultural production, ‘writing [is] adapted to money as the general equivalent’.8 Even academic discourse cannot escape the accusation of mechanical writing and of the perpetuation of an oedipal culture of ‘interpretosis’.9 In Ulysses it is the penultimate episode ‘Ithaca’

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which is expressive of a modern language turned mechanical and discursive in the imaginary society of late capitalism. Yet in his individual work Deleuze is also following an aesthetic shift of the machinic in language. He makes this shift, as noted before, by substituting the ‘organic’ systems of Aristotelian representation and Platonic aesthetics with a machinic thought and a philosophy of events. In the pragmatic aesthetic context of event and machinic becomings, literary writing is no archaism, it has never been more alive, hence for Deleuze: ‘Language is itself the ultimate double which expresses all doubles – the highest of simulacra.’10 Language is now a superior material for radical aesthetic production of the simulacrum, a concept that Deleuze adapts from Nietzsche’s idea of an eternal return. The Logic of Sense is Deleuze’s most aesthetically orientated and ‘affirmative’ work in which he explores the radical power of modern literature to exploit the double metaphysic of language by generating paradoxes and problems. In this experimental context Deleuze frequently celebrates Joyce as a key figure, including him in a select group of authors who have employed ‘series relations’ in their work. Yet of course in this duplicitous modern climate and epoch, Deleuze (and Guattari’s) own thought – including their view of language and their response to a writer like Joyce – is typically double-edged. Whilst Deleuze upholds Joyce as a paradigm of aesthetic radicalism, with Guattari he accuses Joyce of organicism. Deleuze and Guattari criticise Joyce for managing to ‘shatter the linear unity of the word, even of language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge’. The implication is that Joyce, like other modern writers, has merely substituted unity with a supplementary, spiritual or ‘superior unity’, instead of creating a work of concrete immanence.11 Such remarks, in the light of Deleuze’s own championing of Joyce in another work, prove that the pivoting between the despotic-symbolic and the capitalist imaginary is ongoing; Deleuze cannot escape it even in his own work. Hence Joyce and Deleuze (and Guattari) share the highly charged tension of the paradox of the imaginary and can be assessed in a similar light. They are both radical and pragmatic thinkers and writers in similar ways, but also cyclical, totalising and mechanistic in the same ways. However vital and chaotic Ulysses is, it is also very much a great, surveying, singular mind of a text. Both Joyce’s and Deleuze’s styles of thought and writing suggest that extreme radicalism and extreme mechanism may well be two sides of the same coin. Joyce thus provides this book with a hinge point because it is in Ulysses that we confront some kind of

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limit. To bring Joyce together with Deleuze in a literary reading is to confront this limit, but it is also to acknowledge the status of this book itself as a machine. Indeed in order to probe what is intrinsically at stake in the machinic as both a conceptual movement and a symptom of history, the book itself must also acknowledge its own self-reflexivity and machinic status. It is by way of the pure pragmatics of Joyce’s linguistically inclined text, which more than that of the other writers departs from the normative novelistic terms of the human and temporal form, that we might access and so test the limits of the machinic as a rhetorical, aesthetic and human proposition. Therefore it is Joyce who provides a way of thinking the imaginary and the machinic at the heart of the book. Joyce’s epic traces the events of a single (pre-war) day and thus in Ulysses we reach the point at which time and history stand still. By more or less immobilising life, and by multiplying its minutiae, Ulysses is the route for thinking into the micro-technical side of life, and how the imaginary machine works. Ulysses offers itself as an experimental convergence of the ‘tools’ of history and thought as they stand at that/this point in history: of language, the organic and the mechanical, and of the tension, the freedom, and the capture in the deterritorialising and reterritorialising double-action. These are the technical ingredients of the machine that powers modern social life, and it is our task to find out through Ulysses how they compose this machine. Because Joyce’s work is a scientific, encyclopaedic, playful, chaotic, documentative and literary territory, more than a narrative or story, in this chapter I have therefore attempted not so much to read Ulysses, but to map the novel’s machinic movements. We cannot just submit to Ulysses: the book requires us to found our own critical machines in response to it.

The aesthetic shift as double-action I have suggested that the double-action of Ulysses – in which the book forms a bridge between the symbolic and the imaginary – is synonymous with a significant aesthetic shift from the classical to the modern experimental period, the cultural implications of which came to a head in the last century. The ‘double life’ of Ulysses inheres in the sense in which the novel is neither strictly classical nor experimental. Thus, claims Umberto Eco, in Ulysses we find ‘the conflict of a traditional order and a new vision of the world, the conflict of the artist who tries to give form to the chaos in which he moves yet finds in his hands the instruments of the old Order which he has not yet succeeded in

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replacing’.12 For Deleuze, it is the very notion of sense that brings the implications of this aesthetic shift into focus: the term ‘sense’ encompasses both rational and non-rational understanding. Sense is that alchemical dimension where words become things, and vice versa. For Deleuze, sense is the (hitherto neglected) fourth dimension of language that has the capacity to release ‘incorporeal events’, making language the site of extraordinary metaphysical activity between abstract signifiers and concrete phenomena such as bodies and material objects. Thus for Deleuze, sense is ‘exactly the boundary between propositions and things. It is this aliquid at once extra-Being and inherence’.13 However, classical aesthetics is divided by the duality of sense as theory, and sense as experience. Deleuze puts the problem in the following way: Aesthetics suffers from a wrenching duality. On one hand, it designates the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience; on the other hand, it designates the theory of art as the reflection of real experience. For these two meanings to be tied together the conditions of experience in general must become conditions of real experience; in this case, the work of art would really appear as experimentation.14 Classical aesthetics is divided by a tension between an awareness of the discrepancy between how we come to know, and how we do know, thus a tension between the possible and the real. The discrepancy caused is finally that between the aesthetic product and the way it is produced. What is possible is not quite real (and therefore is inferior) and yet provides the optimum conditions for delivering the real to us. What is real is superior, and yet the process of abstract reflection upon this reality risks falling into the stagnation of the past. This tension between the possible and the real thus exposes the temporal dimension of aesthetic knowing, that is a tension between past-oriented reflective knowledge and future-oriented possible knowledge. The former must pause in the present to apprehend and assimilate generality (or totality), and thus risk falling into an expired space that precludes discovery and future knowing. Modern experimental art overcomes the limitations of classicism by all at once linking the present real with the possible future (thus preventing slipping into the closure of the past), the particular with the general, and the mode of production with the product, as in a Deleuze-Guattarian desiring-machine. A linking of the possible and the present means a present, full knowledge of the real can be attained in the ongoing process of discovery of the real, and will not interfere with the latter.

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As a whole, Ulysses charts this transition from classical to an experimental aesthetic: from bounty in reflection to bounty in experimentation. In Ulysses’ earlier sections, Deleuze’s aesthetic duality is engendered by the ‘chaosmos’ of the text, in Bloom, for example: ‘Funny, I don’t remember that. Hallstand too full. Four umbrellas, her raincloak. Picking up the letters. Drago’s shopbell ringing. Queer I was just thinking that moment.’15 Whilst the interior monologue technique purports to enact the ‘truth’ of the disjointedness of lived experience and mental life, the represented effect of the disjointed and incomplete stream of thoughts can be bewildering for the unassuming reader, who cannot always rely on coherence of individual thoughts, hence Bloom’s thought fragments above. Through knowing Bloom’s experience partially, the reader is subsumed not in past-oriented reflective, theoretical knowledge, which is also an abstract form of knowledge, but in possible, future-oriented knowing that is real, experimental and vital. In this case, the style of the above text conveys to us the superiority of a momentary, partial, and flowing style over and above one which works through total, yet stagnant and reflective knowledge. But the ‘initial style’ of Ulysses also speaks of Joyce’s classical Aristotelian heritage that is adapted by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into a device the latter terms the ‘rhythm of beauty’. The aesthetic device the ‘rhythm of beauty’ is motivated by the idea that a highly technical style is necessary to reflect Nature’s vital complexity: the interaction of her parts to the whole and her ‘rapid flux of images’ only in their ‘present time and place’, as Stuart Gilbert suggests.16 Hence, argues Gilbert confidently, Joyce’s rhythm of beauty is ‘a device which, for all its apparent artificiality, exactly resembles Nature’s method’. One of the simpler aspects of this device, he continues, is the ‘presentation of fragments of a theme or allusion in different parts of the work; these fragments have to be assimilated in the reader’s mind for him to arrive at complete understanding’.17 The ‘rhythm of beauty’ in Ulysses consists in the multitude of allusions and references – these can be fragments of conversation, factual detail or intellectual and esoteric themes, which recur and connect over the text. Hence the ‘rhythm of beauty’ is a device which gives the appearance of chaos and randomness, but which in actuality Joyce has precisely plotted. This is the first step on Joyce’s pathway to modern aesthetic experimentalism for connecting the aesthetic theory of experience with real experience – the ‘real’ experience of the reader, who must work to apprehend the total vision. The ‘rhythm of beauty’ suggests that a machinic vision of nature – as a profusion

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of localised connections and unprecedented becomings – was acknowledged as far back as the classical tradition and indeed that machinic understanding in the classical context, in contrast to how the machinic will increasingly emerge in Ulysses, was not machineoriented, but closely fused with nature. The ‘initial style’ of Ulysses reflects Joyce’s classical heritage: a curious blend of a detached, impartial tone partnered with a fervent, naturalistic commitment to heterogeneous detail. Nature is seen as having an ‘internal rhythm’ that necessitates a measure of impartiality on the part of the artist, in order that this machinic dimension might be perceived at all. It is the duty of creators/artists, such as Joyce or Stephen Dedalus, to ‘practice’ impartiality and mechanism in order to increase powers of perception. But the classical method, which houses the machinic vitality, very much relies on the organic structure of the book or work of art ‘as theory’ in exactly the same way that the human becomings of the Ramsay family and the primitive social life of Lawrence’s Brangwens were dependent on an interdependent, limitative structure. In the aesthetic context the hierarchy dictates that the theory or vision of the world is politically more powerful than the artist who is accorded the task of representing it. As in Woolf and Lawrence, Joyce’s journey in Ulysses will be to change the terms of the organic structure, but in his case this process will be carried out in the realm of aesthetics. In the cases of all the writers, it is the limitation of this first stage of modernism, the organic, which ostensibly defines the limits of what the machinic can be. And in all cases, the process has been (and still will be with Joyce) one of a reconfiguration of the terms under which the machinic, or life is produced and represented in the work of art. At this modern stage of the process, we are faced with little more than an ostensible liberation, because we have not yet ascertained how much or indeed even whether the mechanical mode of modernity can render a more liberated state of affairs, but it is Ulysses which will provide the answer. The ‘rhythm of beauty’ is the prevailing device in the sections of what Joyce referred to as Ulysses’ ‘initial style’,18 where it is undertaken in a vein of formal seriousness that is in line with its aesthetic heritage. But increasingly the text begins to rebel against classical representation and transforms this rhythm into a playful practice that entirely subverts the serious function of the rhythmic medium. Hence the narrative parodies the fragmented form by starting to ‘play’ with random instances of these already established ‘pieces’ of ‘real’ life from the ‘Aeolus’ episode onwards: the soap in Bloom’s pocket recurs and is parodied in the soap headline in ‘Aeolus’, and the enigma of McIntosh

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recurs throughout the whole work and is never resolved. In this way, the narrator is adding an extra dimension – of play – to the vital aesthetic the ‘rhythm of beauty’ by parodying the latter. Fragments not only become vehicles for the (machinic) aesthetic shift in which, for Deleuze, ‘the conditions of experience in general must become conditions of real experience’,19 but they shed the hierarchical structures that determine their rhythm. But as a text of hierarchical and subversive ‘rhythms of beauty’ and as in what we might rename the ‘rhythm of play’, Ulysses is like a great narrative ‘mind’ which contains an inordinate amount of these recurring, mutating fragments – playful, serious, mundane, meaningful and non-meaningful. Indeed Ulysses thrives on the tension between the serious and the playful, and the text exploits these two dimensions of its style that span and evoke the aesthetic shift from the classical to the experimental in which the novel is engaged. Hence we see that it is the novel’s notably encyclopaedic, journalistic style (an effect of the impersonal gravity of the classical aesthetic and its commitment to a ‘rhythm of beauty’) that generates the very context and material for play. The dense, journalistic style provides a considerable quantity of detailed material that is ideal for aesthetic recurrence and for the formation of elaborate puzzles, allusions and enigmas. It is these playful elements that dredge the text up out of its classical heritage and in the direction of modern experimentalism. Deleuze has another term for this machinic aesthetic practice: the simulacrum or the eternal return. The simulacrum denotes a recurring and aleatory fragment of a previous form that returns in an altered state (in Ulysses, as a puzzle or enigma) as an effect of the original. In this event, the simulacrum breaks with the organic Platonic aesthetic of ‘original’ or ‘copy’. In Ulysses recurring fragments increasingly break down the earlier (relatively) organic, foundation of the text, but in a playful way, in a ‘becoming-mad’ of the text and in a ‘joyful and positive’ event, which has ‘the power of affirming chaos’.20 The salient event of simulation and eternal return in Ulysses is the simultaneity between Homer’s Odyssey with the day’s events of 16 June 1904. The ‘series relation’ (as Deleuze terms it) of this double story itself qualifies as an event of the simulacrum. The simulacrum creates a positive power by ‘placing disparate elements or heterogeneous series in communication’: it is fuelled by paradox. The simulacrum is this half-organic, half-mechanical event. The simulating power of the simulacrum is not false or an illusion, it has what Deleuze calls a ‘phantasmatic’ or ‘repressed power’.21 Aside from the various concepts of becoming propounded elsewhere, the concept of

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heterogeneous series or simulacrum is one of the main attempts Deleuze makes at figuring a machinic practice in a literary context. What Joyce/the narrator is doing therefore, by converting the traditional aesthetic into simulacra, is rebelling against the classical requirement that he and the medium conform to a generalised concept or vision, and elevating himself and his medium to the superior level of agency. He is licensing himself and his language to lose what is organic and to be simply vital and mechanical; in short, to be machinic. Hence Joyce’s text begins to produce within its own production, to generate simulacra. In this event the narrator releases a machinic proliferation, which is in excess of the generalised concept of nature or the world. This productive excess burgeons as the novel progresses. It is as a result of this process that Joyce has completely turned his classical heritage around. In Ulysses, the opening episode, ‘Telemachus’ functions to alert us to the presence of the simulacrum in the text, and the way in which, out of a process of recurrence of tradition, what will emerge will be something unprecedented.

‘Telemachus’: the microcosmic machine Having established the way Joyce creatively handles the style and content of his machinic vision, a treatment which spans a spectrum of the classically influenced and the playfully subversive ‘rhythms’ of life, we can move on to the structure of the whole machine of the novel, and the multiple, different machines contained in it. Many theorists agree that Ulysses is an extremely heuristic text. Marilyn French likens the topology of Ulysses to the concentric circles found in ‘Ithaca’.22 We can see the first episode ‘Telemachus’, as the most concentrated and didactic circle then, insofar as it both contains and signals what is to come, but also instructs us how to read it. Like Lawrence’s Rainbow, the opening of Joyce’s novel contains a concentrated version of its ‘metaphysic’: ‘Telemachus’ is the first machine of the text that is immanently encoded with the technology of the whole novel. Like a Deleuzian desiring-machine, the form and function of ‘Telemachus’ are one. ‘Telemachus’ is pregnant with the simulacrum and its actions of mimicry and performance. Karen Lawrence has noted this incipient self-reference and theatricality of ‘Telemachus’ in claiming that ‘instead of parodying the linguistic idiosyncrasies of a type of character, the narrator dons a stylistic mask of innocence to parody the very enterprise of telling a story’.23

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She goes on to argue that the presence of this ‘naïve literary style’ (what Joyce designated as the ‘narrative young’ style of the episode) implies ‘that the text as well as the character is trying on a costume’. In it, she claims, we also glimpse both the narrative mimicry of a type of text (as opposed to a mimicry of character) in which language tends to quote itself, both of which will become normative narrative activities in the latter half of the book.24 Joyce is undoubtedly the most self- conscious of all the three authors. Ulysses continually exposes the processes and mechanisms of art in the course of being a work of art, and moves between its own form and function. Both the action and the idea of the simulacrum are embodied in the inflated ‘gross’ character of Buck Mulligan whose forceful personality is intended to make an impact. Hence: Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. (1) The strangeness of this creature with its blessing, ‘shaking’ and ‘gurgling’ immediately invites questions. That he (Buck) is a parody immediately springs to mind, yet there seems to be more behind it. His gown, his large movements, and frequent parallels between his hair and wood suggest an expressive tradition and a simulation of that tradition – an infinitely expanding gesture of simulation. Thus Buck’s gross gesture, like the book, enacts a decentralised spectacle. He shakes and gurgles around a void, a void that Stephen reflects by looking ‘coldly’ back at him. The shaking and gurgling is a kind of raw kinesis around a displaced centre, which can be likened to Deleuze’s eternal return: ‘a circle which is always excentric in relation to an always decentred center’.25 There is, moreover, an affective charge (Buck’s shaking and gurgling) that is produced through the internal resonance of the simulacra, of the continually displaced centre and divergence of series, hence for Deleuze, the ‘impression of death, of the rupture or dismembering of life’ in the work of art is explained by the amplitude of the forced movement which carries them along. Thus the conditions of real experience and the structures of the work of art are reunited: divergence of series, decentring of circles, constitution of the chaos which envelops

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them, internal resonance and movement of amplitude, aggression of the simulacra. 26 The aggressive and exaggerated character of Buck symbolises the ‘forced’ and amplifying movement of the narrative, which will work its way through a divergent series of stylistic variations and thus continually displace its own centre, causing itself and the reader to collide in shared ‘real’ experience. In this sense, ‘Telemachus’ is the episode in which the deterritorialising and reterritorialising movements of the narrative are in such close proximity as to be almost simultaneous. The double-action is also suggested in the marked duality of Buck. He is elevated by graceful and ceremonious language, hence: ‘bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed’ and his dressing gown is ‘sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air’ (1). Yet hand in hand with this is a brutish nature: he calls to Stephen ‘coarsely’, he is ‘plump’ and physically exposed; the gown is ‘ungirdled’. The tendency of the narrator to simultaneously exalt and denigrate is something we must get used to in Ulysses. Buck’s every action and word has a sort of vigorous magnanimity to it, hence: ‘He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk’ (5). Indeed again this is a subtle instance of the text’s didactic quality; Buck’s approach to life is the sort of robust, positive, dynamic and, most importantly, humorous approach we are to take with the text. If we persist we will find its bits of glitter, its ‘gold points’ and its jewels (1). The above quotation is also an example of Joycean lyrical imagery, which vaunts one image off another, and achieves a dancing quality of narrative, a flurry of movement – here of mirror, laughter, teeth, and light.

The cinematic textual machine I have suggested that the text is moving towards making a sharp break with classical representation involving a shift from the narrator as a mechanism representing vital life. The shift moves the narrator and the text into an embodiment of a joint, creative ‘machine’ in which the creator uses his mechanical form – language – as his instrument of liberation from the organic mode, by way of allowing him to ‘act’ as machinically as the natural life he takes as his subject. But as the

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autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the classically nuanced ‘initial style’ of Ulysses suggest, the organic classical heritage was an enormously ingrained influence on Joyce’s aesthetic sensibilities, and making the shift was no small feat. Of course it is a shift that is more commonly recognised as a pivotal modernist rebellion against ‘high’ culture to mass culture, which involved an embrace in art and literature of the new technology and mass media of the period. Whereas the rigid high-cultural aesthetic had a limited view of the forms and subjects that could properly be called art, so-called avant-garde art embraced technology and the ordinariness of everyday life. Joyce is considered a central figure of this later modernist impulse of the avantgarde, which also laid the ground for postmodernist art and practice. But as his most experimental works – Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – attest, the mechanism, non-humanism, pedantry and rigour of the classical tradition never quite left Joyce’s methods. These qualities and practices continued to dictate his style of narrative perception and structure, even when Joyce had both succeeded in collapsing the rigid distinction in the roles of artist/medium and vision, and when his subject matter had shifted to become more topically modern. Hence Joyce’s machinic textual chaosmos of the simulacra is a scientific production in the same vein as the ‘rhythm of beauty’. But Joyce did not just convert his classical heritage into a machinic narrative practice – he used it to nuance his thoroughly modern portrait of Dublin. For in his multiform move away from tradition and history Joyce was also embracing not merely textual, but the literal machines of modern life, and to do this he utilised the metaphysic of the classically influenced ‘rhythm of beauty’. This metaphysic consists in the concepts of stasis and kinesis. Stasis and its antithesis ‘kinesis’ represent Joyce’s interpretation and reworking of Aristotelian aesthetics into a ‘moral account of art’. As suggested before, classical aesthetics were characterised by a scientific and impartial eye intended to preserve the autonomy and complexity of the machine of nature. The classical aesthetic strove to avoid arousing a kinetic or emotional response in the looker, in favour of a static or ‘ideal pity’ or an ‘ideal terror’, as Stephen Dedalus states in A Portrait.27 Stasis can be understood as the mechanical, scientific, non-human element of perception, which is necessary for a human to perceive the machine of nature. Indeed, according to this aesthetic theory, the complex rhythm of beauty of a fragmented textual cosmos can only be apprehended through stasis. Although the end of A Portrait can largely be said to signify a flight from tradition accompanied by what Christy Burns calls Joyce’s ‘gradual

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disidentification with Stephen’,28 and Joyce also later renounced what he had previously endorsed in Gilbert’s work, as I have suggested in regard to Ulysses, strands of the classical aesthetic tradition continue to subsist in Joyce’s methods. As Eco claims, ‘many of the major aesthetic pivots of the early Joyce remain valid in his successive works’.29 Indeed stasis is a general principle in Joyce’s work. Stasis is the state of paralysis of many of his depictions of Dubliners, including those in Ulysses. As has been often observed, little of significance seems to occur in Ulysses: the characters seem incapable of acting. In the sections comprising what Karen Lawrence designates as the ‘narrative norm’, or the more realistic initial sections, stasis translates into a marmoreal narrative quality: the sense that all is being impassively carved from marble.30 Often, in ‘Calypso’, for example, isolated body parts, rather than the whole person, are that which act and seem carved in impassive stone. For example: ‘A tolerant smile curled his lips.’ (4) ‘His eyelids sank quietly often as he walked in happy warmth.’ (68) ‘Her spoon ceased to stir up the sugar.’ (79) ‘Her full lips, drinking, smiled.’ (76) The first of these refers to Buck (in ‘Telemachus’) the second to Bloom, and the last two to Molly. The character is (gently) dehumanised by the indirect narration: it guides them, rather than licenses their agency, and shows the vitality of their actions as indivisible from a ubiquitous urban or domestic fabric. Sara Danius links Ulysses’ unique, fragmentary textual style to a range of technological phenomena that were emerging in (mass) cultural life in the early twentieth-century, including cinematic apparatus. For Danius, the ‘human sensorium’ of Ulysses is a work in which ‘perception has become an end in itself, disconnected from the accumulation of knowledge’ and which, ‘in keeping with the attempt to elaborate an aesthetics of immediacy’, seeks ‘to be immanent to itself’. Danius speaks of Ulysses’ visual fragments, such as the above involving Molly, as ‘framed, leveled, and deterritorialized [ ... ] diverse phenomena [which] effectively turn into spectacles before the reader’s eye’ and which could be described as ‘a series of close-ups’.31 Danius’s reading is admirable for its close engagement with a range of technological forms in conjunction with Ulysses. But in the context of my metaphysical reading, it seems pertinent to probe more deeply the precise mechanics of this cinematic mode of vision in Ulysses. A closer

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look at this narrative style reveals that Joyce’s ‘cinematic’ narrative mode is formed out of a refashioning of the classical qualities of stasis and kinesis. All the fragments above subtly enact stasis in conjunction with kinesis. By combining visual stasis with actual movement, the image can be seen to be working off the disjunction between stasis and movement. This has the effect that we see the movement in a controlled cinematic way. Thus stasis can be more productively seen as a way of locking in the visual quality of movement. Therefore in the first example here, rather than register that Buck smiled, we watch a smile occur on him – a subtle blend of stasis and kinesis. The persistent, withholding quality of stasis intertwined with individual units of kinetic action is responsible for crystallising a certain cinematic visual quality in the work. Thus we frequently see the use of ‘gentle’ adverbs like ‘quietly’, ‘calmly’ and ‘soberly’ with reference to Bloom, particularly in terms of his eye or gaze. These adverbs act machinically; they enact the neutral, removed transparency of the camera gaze by causing a subtle lapse and offsetting and framing, so to speak, the kinesis of the action. This technique allows non-human, heterogeneous phenomena to ‘speak’ in spite of human presence, and to exist as if autonomously. In order to allow the articulation of the non-human, these adverbs must be logically and linguistically inappropriate, hence eyelids sinking ‘quietly’. They are the ‘becoming-imperceptible’ of Bloom. Indeed Bloom moves so smoothly and passively it is as if he is in another medium, hence: ‘Entering the bedroom he halfclosed his eyes and walked through warm yellow twilight towards her tousled head’ (74). The cinematic text, in a manner of looking at it, equates with the implementation of the mechanical ideal within the work of art, and is Joyce’s modern take on the aesthetic classical heritage spoken of previously. The cinematic text also suggests the surface, rather than the depth of modernity, in which private and public domains are fusing. Individuals are no longer simply defined by their subjective qualities, depth or internal experiences, but in terms of their propensity to lock into a surface of culture, to lock into a generalised machine. Later we see Bloom reading ‘blandly’, which suggests his mechanistic interaction with culture. Although the initial sections are the most novelistic in one sense, their focus on sensuality and, as I have argued, on formal visuality, suggest the increasing tactility of modern, mechanical art and its audiences that were alluded to by Walter Benjamin, with whom I will engage later.32 The cinematic is also profoundly a gesture of the text: it is the creative mechanistic in which the text exhibits its own means of production – in which form and function are one.

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‘Primitive’ writing Thus far I have suggested two ways in which Ulysses is encoded with and ‘performs’ machines, both of which are textually pragmatic forms: the simulacrum and the cinematic dimension of the text. But there are many different sorts of machines in Ulysses, indeed so many, that they start to form a complex imbrication. There is the localised machine of a city and of a group of lives, but like The Rainbow, this local story feeds into a ‘universal’ history of global civilisation that carries with it the weight of history. This connection between the local and the universal in Joyce’s text is acted out not just on a thematically and referentially implicit, but also on a technical, level. The text does this through a sequence of different modes of representation that correspond to Deleuze and Guattari’s three social machines. In this way the text presents the technical logic that results in capitalism and the imaginary social machine. If Ulysses is enacting a ‘universal history’, then in the human-centred sections of the initial style what Deleuze and Guattari call the primitive-territorial social machine is very much in operation. There is an enormously strong engagement with flows of physical, desiring, earthly life, as if they are being immanently inscribed as ‘codes’ onto the text, in the same way as in Deleuze and Guattari’s primitive machine the physical body is a surface of inscription in immanent connection with the forces of the earth. I will pause briefly and spell out the way I am applying Deleuze’s three modes of universal history to a politics of representation. As was explored in The Rainbow, the trajectory of these modes of social machines consisted in different modes of energy use across various spheres of personal and social life, both individual and collective. The energy was seen to change in character with the advancement of each new stage, and the trajectory mapped by the three stages was of a deterritorialising movement away from the body and visceral collectivity and activity, to more abstract forms of organisation such as religion and the intellectualised world of work and education. Lawrence’s technique in The Rainbow tended to imply these modes of history partially through linguistic style, but largely through human behaviour. In this context, alterations in linguistic style were in service to, and secondary effects of, changes in the characters’ relational dynamics. But in Ulysses the mediation of the three social machines of history is entirely a function of language and textuality. The mechanics of the different representational modes used by Joyce to convey these stages are quite distinctive. The first primitive machine engenders a great degree of

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fusion between signifier and signified, word and world. The despotic machine, or symbolic textual mode, which emerges in the novel’s middle sections (culminating in ‘Oxen of the Sun’), enacts the displacement of the territorial ‘real’ by establishing a transcendent site of reference or superior world over the action and world of the text. Further along in the imaginary mode, the relationship between text and world is completely severed and displaced – the text abandons all accountability to that which it initially set out to record and is engaged instead in the circulation of a flow of representations and images of the ‘real’ world of the text. But increasingly the circulation of the real world of the text causes the text to lose reality. The more the work of art aesthetically begins to take on the ‘conditions of real experience’ in the machinic sense, the less the text resembles reality. The primitive in Ulysses articulates a preconscious realm of life: it attempts to speak prior to the symbolic function that places the book in a state of remove from the world. The primitive machine of the text suggests an attempt to revive the corporeality of inscription: on a passive, thematic level this consists in the assignation of each episode to a part or organ of the body, and on an active level it consists in the book’s marked preoccupation with vital phenomena: sex, food, waste, the body and death. Like the other dominant modes in the text, the primitive writing seems to test the very structures of representation through which it is mediated: it is that quality of Joyce’s style which fuses what is physical in life with the physicality of words, and highlights their proximity. Hence the famous introduction to Bloom: ‘Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards [ ... ] liver slices fried with crustcrumbs [ ... ] most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine’ (65). Critics have tended to focus on the pragmatic, sensual and ordinary dimensions of Bloom and his world.33 Yet it is also the very wordiness that is physical here: the variety and profusion of consonants that hold their shortened vowels in tight capture emulate the actual experience of eating. Indeed the effort of consonant articulation in the vocal delivery of these words actually causes the mouth to start to salivate as it would during eating. In her Deleuzian reading of Joyce, Marie-Dominique Garnier sees Bloom’s opening breakfast scene as ‘a linguistic exercise on a plateau’ insofar as language, lingo, is treated in close connection with matters pertaining to the tongue, the inner organs, the gloss of the cat’s hide and the

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porous holes of its (her) licking lapping tongue. Palate, fine tang, dry mouth, rough tongue: the Joycean text relishes the ‘inner organs’ of words, the gutturals, labials or fricatives of a dawning day’s cryptic ‘Calypso’ code.34 She points to the sense in which in the opening of ‘Calypso’ the text ‘eats’ itself, and we eat with it. Like Bloom, we are starting to chew – on the text – we are starting to become acquainted with its consistency. This radical proximity of reader, language and narrative subject is perhaps the most immanent or core layer of the textual ‘machine’ – the most visceral action of this text. Further, on the symbolic level of narrative meaning (a more exterior stratum) the nominalistic precision of these first lines of ‘Calypso’ accomplish much: they indicate a naturalistic and scientific approach to Bloom, they apprehend the world as dictated by the laws of matter and desire, and they function microcosmically; they both employ and denote mechanism. Thus the portrayal of Bloom, both robotic and pleasurable – ‘Mr Bloom ate with relish’ – intimates the functional nature of Bloom’s character within the text. He is a cog in the machine of urban nature. In the intimacy of his kitchen, we are plunged into a reality in which animate (the cat) and even inanimate objects, if only momentarily, express themselves, the kettle, for example, ‘sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out’. The cat cries ‘Mrkgnao!’ and is anthropomorphically accused of being ‘vindictive’ and of having a human understanding (65–66). Primitive writing is very much part of the initial sections of the text. For example the dog in ‘Proteus’ also invokes a frenzied narrative physicality: Along by the edge of the mole he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed against it. [ ... ] He rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spousebreach, vulturing the dead. (58) The wordiness of this style is partly connected to the writerly self- consciousness of the young academic Stephen Dedalus, the character who is encountering the dog, but the use of words also conveys something more significant about the ‘democratic’ textual approach of Ulysses. There is what we might call an innate democracy of the writing in this novel, in which the eloquence and bounty of language is deliberately awarded to and exercised on all manner and level of sensual and animal

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life, and is no longer the exclusive province of a learned, human elite. Hence it is the very baseness of the dog that, in the political context of this text, qualifies as a sophisticated mode of sensuality, rendering the dog worthy of the descriptive and unusual terms ‘pard’, ‘spousebreach’ and ‘vulturing’. These words give credence to a non-rational, dog language by literally speaking the sense of the dog. Although Lawrence and Joyce are so different in their levels of aesthetic self-consciousness, it is the extent to which they use language in a powerfully enactive way that brings them into affinity. Both writers show a strong impulse towards asserting a democratic relation between word and world: words seek to honour the character and form of what they designate so thoroughly, that they effectively fuse with what is signified. It is as if primitive writing is seeking to undo the originary movement of deterritorialisation that, as Deleuze suggests, defined the despotic practice of writing. It is as if in primitive writing, language is trying to reverse its own biunivocalism: that primary action of deterritorialisation, which separates signifier from signified and accords the signifier superior status. Technically, these primitive, vital vignettes constitute the represented (secondary) machinic of the classical system of aesthetics and of the organic theory of Nature, as opposed to the coming experimental (revolutionary) aesthetic, which forms a machinic connection between creator and text. They are secondary instances of the machinic because they are still largely represented and more obviously controlled by the narrator. But they represent a text in transition. These intensely vivid vignettes signal and pragmatically effect the developing shift from the classical to the experimental. They show us a language pushing to be born into agency (or a nature trying to burst free of language) in order to liberate themselves into full-blown experimentation. Representation is bursting out of its classical straitjacket. The dominant metaphysic of Joyce’s text, one might argue, is the increasing force of irony and humour generated by the linguistic exploits, and the accumulating sense of Joyce as the Creator, behind the work, who is engineering the machinic vision. But it is the strongly visual, cinematic dimension of the text, in addition to its tendency for prodigious documentation, which renders Ulysses a ‘hyperconscious’ text. It is a text in which almost everything is surveyed and self-surveying. Joyce harnesses sensory (human) affects, yet these affects tend to be locked into visual depiction. Joyce has made vision the abstract commerce of all the senses. The visual calculates the other senses and in this way is not dissimilar to the system that handles the flows in the capitalist machine.

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Flows of goods and resources are circulated in such a way as to give the appearance of freedom and mobility (which consists in the freedom of the consumer to choose and in the continual appearance of the ‘new’), whilst in truth these flows have never left the tight capture of the abstract monetary mechanism, which constantly reterritorialises the flows and codes, and which quantifies them in accordance with a singular standard.35 The visual privileging and circulation of life as images render Ulysses an ‘imaginary’ production in the same manner in which capitalism itself is.

Bloom as capitalist subject: the cynical machine Out of the three writers, it is Joyce who looks most favourably and intently at the machine age. As I have shown so far, Ulysses produces a variety of different kinds of pragmatic machines such as the cinematic and the animalistic/corporeal. The later sections of the ‘initial style’ shift from a pragmatic to a thematic engagement with the ‘machine’ of modern society. Hence before turning to the symbolic and imaginary representative modes of the text, I will first examine how the thematic content of Ulysses also contributes to the image of capitalism we are seeking to reveal in it. In a very real way, the first half of Bloom’s day monitors the sense in which modern life is composed of an amplifying sequence of interlocking machines – individual, domestic, commercial, social, professional – which concur with the passage of his day and journey into Dublin society. There are explicit connections, such as the metaphysical intersection between ‘Hades’ and ‘Aeolus’: the former portrays the machines of life and death in the graveyard, and in ‘Aeolus’ machines are depicted as the jaws of life and anthropomorphised, hence the recurring ‘sllt’ of the printing machine. The latter does not go unnoticed by Bloom: ‘Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak [ ... ] Everything speaks in its own way’ (154). In this way, Joyce celebrates mechanical (homogeneous) machines, by animating them. More significantly, this animation completely compounds his abnegation of the human, insofar as the mechanical has become not just his aesthetic form, but also his content. He shows us that the human can be utterly removed from the picture. Indeed Ulysses conveys the idea that machines are not only more human than we would like to think, but that modern human beings must, in some respects, act mechanically. This paradox of mechanisation as a factor of mental life is no doubt most derivative of an urban

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existence. The twentieth-century (particularly urban) subject must incorporate a mechanical element into its consciousness in order to survive. Both Bloom and his wife Molly are effective in this respect insofar as they can make timely emotional shifts to avoid futile or dangerous tangents of thought. Thus Bloom’s robust mechanism for bringing himself into the present moment: Well, I am here now [ ... ] Must begin again those Sandow’s exercises. On the hands down. Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. Why is that? Valuation is only twenty-eight [ ... ] To smell the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes. (73–74) Lofty speculations, dreams and nightmares transcend the present moment, whereas numbers, real estate, and sensual things focus the mind within it. Whilst Bloom tends to rationalise his own fantasies, hence: ‘Probably not a bit like it really’ (68), Molly similarly shows a capacity to quickly move on when her thoughts turn to her dead son Rudy. Bloom’s evaluations and calculations, his synopses, his quick mental diversions are part of his orientation mechanism in response to the shock effect of modern, urban, life. The change in consciousness brought about by modern urban life is engaged with innovatively by Walter Benjamin, who in 1936, spoke of ‘the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face’, and the corresponding ‘profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus – changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen’.36 That Benjamin saw film as the art form most in keeping with these changes in perception in the twentieth century, links with the cinematic quality I examined in the early episodes: as if Joyce sought to forge the tactile spirit of the age in narrative. Because the classical era of artistic ‘contemplation’ no longer applies, argues Benjamin, modern man needs art to provide him with a kind of psychic buffer. Film produces thus a ‘moral shock effect’ (much like the unprecedented sensible experience of the city street) by bombarding the viewer with images and sounds without allowing him time to form his own associations.37 In this way, modern man receives culture in a state of distraction that is ‘primarily tactile’ and, continues Benjamin, ‘the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit’.38 We can interpret, then, this ability of the person to unconsciously perform habitual tasks, as a sign that

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consciousness has incorporated a measure of mechanisation into itself. Whether this psychic manipulation by visual means is positive, as Benjamin suggests, or negative as many critics of capitalism and its visual culture maintain, Bloom’s day is testimony to a certain necessity for a mechanical element of consciousness that can act as buffer and tool of orientation in the sea of variables that composes modern urban experience. Yet Bloom also lacks a psychic buffer, and suffers from negative barrages of thought. The city itself, in its endless interchange and multiplicity is a trigger for these: Things go on same; day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out [ ... ] Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her [ ... ] Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too [ ... ] Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. [ ... ] No one is anything. (208) Bloom intimates here the increasing decoding action of civilisation: its ceaseless movements, displacements, construction and deterioration. There is an element of humour to this vision, however: again, the predominantly visual dimension of Bloom’s imagining, in combination with the physicality and simplicity of the images, renders the vision cartoon-like. Deleuze and Guattari echo the ruthless nature of the decoding process of history in claiming that ‘any method will do for ensuring this universal decoding: the privatization brought to bear on property, goods, and the means of production, but also on the organs of “private man” himself; the abstraction of monetary quantities [ ... ] of labor’.39 Bloom suffers from this profusion of flows: he feels history as a nightmare of deterritorialisation, of the transience of human lives and efforts, and of the eternality of poverty, disenfranchisement and mercenariness. The endless coming and going with no centre or meaning is the social imaginary – the nightmare produced by capitalism. It links to Stephen’s comment: ‘History [ ... ] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ (42). It is the burden of the modern subject to confront the full force of this collectivised history on an individualised psychic level. Thus claims Peter Sloterdijk, there is a new (modern) cynicism that is ‘lived as a private disposition that absorbs the world situation’.40 Bloom’s confrontation is with the productive flows of the universal history of capitalism. If capitalism, as Deleuze suggests, is a logical endpoint of

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social systems insofar as all others have led up to it, it is universal insofar as it is the point from which all History can be viewed. Indeed Bloom seems to confirm the idea that all History has led up to capitalism, in that, to divert his mind from the negativity, he turns to the immediacy of economic and property value speculations, thus psychically realigning himself with the mechanism. For Bloom, the city, real estate, advertising and arguably sex (given its ‘presentness’) are at the forefront of the edifice of civilisation and history that stretches back behind it. They are the state of things now; the rhythm of modernity. Hence Bloom points towards the sense in which History has become internalised in its subjects on the psychic level. We find in Bloom here a Nietzschean ‘bad conscience’ (a familiar modernist malaise) which, for Deleuze and Guattari, is endemic to capitalism. For the latter (who, like Sloterdijk, draws from Nietzsche on this issue), our interiorised bad conscience or cynicism is the modern equivalent of past ages where cruelty (in the primitive socius) and terror (in the despotic) operated in the social field. They write: ‘It is no longer the age of cruelty or the age of terror, but the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety [ ... ] This age of cynicism is that of the accumulation of capital’.41 For Deleuze and Guattari the capitalist labour force is physically fuelled by cynicism and ‘spiritually’ impelled by a godless principle of piety (‘God-capital’), and in this way the system feeds off of the circularity of bad conscience/lack it has instituted in the psyche of its subjects, as was observed in Ursula in The Rainbow. Sloterdijk also makes the correlation between unhappiness and economic abundance in claiming that modern man is ‘well-off and miserable at the same time’. His concept of ‘enlightened false consciousness’ describes the paradoxical structure of modern cynicism. He claims that cultural discontent ‘has assumed a new quality: It appears as a universal, diffuse cynicism’. For Sloterdijk, modern-day cynics are borderline melancholics, who can keep their symptoms of depression under control and can remain more or less able to work. Indeed, this is the essential point in modern cynicism: the ability of its bearers to work – in spite of anything that might happen, and especially, after anything that might happen.42 Slavoj Žižek interprets the paradox of Sloterdijk’s enlightened false consciousness as the scenario in which ‘one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it’.43 Lawrence’s

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disillusioned modern characters, who combined physical prosperity with conscious spiritual bankruptcy, also registered this false consciousness. False consciousness suggests the extent to which the machine has become psychically internalised: the subject works with the system (mechanically) even whilst cynically against the system. Cynicism is thus dangerously close itself to being an ‘image’ in the machinic choice of capitalist codes, insofar as it offers no pragmatic challenge to the machine. This type of cynicism is therefore the supreme instance of what Deleuze and Guattari call capitalism’s ‘autocritique’. Cynicism is thus part of capitalism’s ‘double-bind’ that renders it so ubiquitous and impossible to elude, when all possible modes of subversion can be absorbed into the mechanical logic of the system, can be thought, without the machine being at all threatened. Ulysses might be said to be politically cynical in a similar way. Although emotionally detached, importantly, the narrator does not lack emotional awareness, as is demonstrated above in the depiction of Bloom’s suffering and predicament. Indeed emotional knowing and sensitivity are simply one more form of knowing in the all-knowing hyperconsciousness of this text. This all-knowing dimension (which knows ‘the falsehood very well’ but which still ‘does not renounce it’44) equates with the political neutrality of Ulysses, and therefore is its ‘cynical’ metaphysic. It is as if the text’s documentative imperative and proclivity for objective knowledge and surveillance supplants the requirement that should have to pass any judgement on anything. However, if Ulysses is a cynical text, it also, on two counts, contains what Deleuze sees as cynicism’s counterpart – piety. Thus the text contains hidden transcendent forces. In Deleuze and Guattari’s model of an imaginary society there is on the one hand the labour of the workers, physical cynicism, and on the other the hidden source of piety, which impels the labour. In Ulysses, there is likewise the material industry of the text, but this is supported by two hidden spiritualised transcendent terms that have withdrawn from the immanent textual field, and yet still wield influence. These consist of, the allusive/referential dimension, the tradition of Knowledge on which the novel rests, and the more integral hidden transcendent – Joyce, the orchestrator. As the Creator of the self-consciously constructed text, Joyce must remain behind the scenes, so as not to ‘behave’ organically. Like the capitalist machine, Ulysses’ narrative impels a ‘labour’ from the reader by asking them to trace the path of a rich intellectual tradition that stretches back to classical mythology. (The text all along demands that we as readers work to read it.) The book is a modern act of reterritorialisation (an

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‘overcoding’) onto a ‘pious’ transcendent of cultural tradition. Certain sections enunciate this ‘symbolic’ mode of the text, which privileges a despotic sign or system of representation over vital life. The political in ‘Hades’ and ‘Cyclops’, the historical in ‘Nestor’, and the esoteric and literary in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ and ‘Oxen of the Sun’ are all intellectual reterritorialisations onto a body of discourse. Hence it comes as no surprise that this spiritual backdrop (of the referential text and the narrator himself) are distorted and mocked in Ulysses because the text functions in the manner of formalised cynicism – an anti-belief. The text must pretend to be averse to organic systems, in order to be able to continue to use them.

Nonsense, paradox and the imaginary As we enter the second half of the novel, we increasingly find ourselves on the plane of deterritorialisation, the latter end of the paradoxical double-action. Ulysses’ path of deterritorialisation follows a journey of the progressive decomposition of sense that amounts to a becomingexperimental/becoming-mad of the work. Indeed as the book progresses, the text in fact duplicates its double-action within us, and dualises our reading processes: it is not that we cease reading in the old way; more we must read increasingly in a nonsensical as well as a sensible way. We must read in two directions at once. This is a sign we are entering the realm of the imaginary, of the displacement of the relation between signifier and signified, between text and world. For Deleuze, in a move away from the classical model described before, the principal task of modern writing should be not to rely on received structures of reality and meaning, but should now be to produce sense, now that we have discovered that sense is ‘never a principle or an origin, but that it is produced. It is not something to discover, to restore, and to re-employ; it is something to produce by a new machinery’.45 In this realm, there is no single sense to be sought, only prolific, heterogeneous sense to be ‘produced’. Part of this production of sense involves apprehending the relation of sense to nonsense. For Deleuze, nonsense and sense are not in a relation of exclusion; they do not form a binary opposition that posits nonsense as a lack of sense, rather, paradoxically, it is nonsense that is already present in the organisation of sense. Nonsense is independent of the regressive laws of the conventional signifying system: it forms instead a heterogeneous series of events, each one of which ‘says its own sense’ without having recourse to the other events in the series. Nonsense is

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embodied in portmanteau and esoteric words, which effectively say their own sense. It is here that the logic of the surface comes into play, hence: Everything happens at the boundaries between things and propositions [ ... ] In one case, that which is most profound is the immediate, in the other, the immediate is found in language. Paradox appears as a dismissal of depth, a display of events at the surface, and a deployment of language along this limit. Humor is the art of the surface, which is opposed to the old irony, the art of depths and heights.46 The surface of Ulysses’ later sections is a surface of nonsense and laughter. Joyce’s book runs not on a temporal or an ontological metaphysic, as in Woolf and Lawrence, but on the abstract joy produced by the act of subversion. For Dominique-Garnier ‘sense roams or “rhizomes” freely, at large, across the field of nonsense or ‘joysense’’.47 This surface equates with the ‘smooth’ space of postmodernity. For Deleuze, language becomes more concrete (and closer to the ‘real’) and less abstract, under these conditions. The intensifying expansive textual productivity of Ulysses’ later sections again echoes Deleuze’s capitalist model whose own incessant production generates a constant ‘surplus value’ of flux. In the event of this excess in Ulysses, representation is ceasing to ‘work’ in the conventional way; it is becoming choked by sheer quantity, and starts to break down.

‘Oxen of the Sun’: the despotic machine In Ulysses the costumes of history and culture adorning language grow increasingly heavier as their novelistic performance progresses. In his notes to the novel, Declan Kiberd claims that ‘Oxen of the Sun’ marks Joyce’s ‘final farewell to the written literary tradition, which was mocked as deathly and excremental from the earliest chapters’ of the book.48 This episode, more than any other, plays out the last great wrestle of representation with its despotic/organic heritage. ‘Oxen’ narrates the fate of the English language and is often seen as a record of the demise of Western civilisation in the centuries leading up to the twentieth century. Yet the attitude of this episode to language is complex: the whole episode wrestles with the beast of language. In the sense that Kiberd suggests above, Ulysses attacks the history and the ostentatious authoritarianism of literariness that causes human action and linguistic sense within the text to suffocate. Yet in another way, the episode is a

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fantastic performance of the unused bounty of the English language (supposedly in the throes of its death), and ‘Oxen’ is thus also attended by a sense of loss. That ‘Oxen’ also depicts the resplendence of the English language suggests the paradox that language is most alive in its own death. Language is thus an impossible entity: wonderful, yet also hyperbolic and authoritarian, impossibly alive and impossibly dead. ‘Oxen’ is critique, celebration and lament all at once. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ implies the sheer weight of sub-textual history that is beneath all utterance, even idle drunken conversations. There are layer upon layer of words and time between people in any conversation. Yet it is sense which is threatened by the pomposity of verbosity, hence the stifling cogitation of the first sentence: Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind’s ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain. (500) This sentence alone is a page long. The notion of ‘original’ (Platonic) sense is thus parodied and tested in ‘Oxen of the Sun’. The enormous sentences test what Deleuze sees as the complementary forces of ‘good’ and ‘common’ sense upon which signification relies, which equate with the ability to go in a singular (thermodynamic) direction and the ability to identify. Yet even if not all is understood in this writing style, meaning can be gleaned from it. Yet sometimes even this fails, and the pomposity descends into clear absurdity, hence: ‘An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial communion’ (513). The elaborate Latinate prose, which imitates the high fertility rates it describes, is one of the first in a sequence of linguistic stages of the narrative’s fast-track through literary history and through the dying stages of the despotic era of representation, a process bearing witness to the diminution of language’s ‘overcoding’ authority. The decreasingly antiquated styles of ‘Oxen’ evoke eras past in which language once exerted the transcendental authority discussed in the introduction. Thus we sense the omnipotent force of theological authority in the Anglo-Saxon prose occurring early on in the episode: ‘Before born babe bliss had.

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Within womb won he worship. Whatever in that one case done commodiously done was’ (502). In this era language not only referred to, but mediated God as a powerful force of immanence. This mode of language – as immanent vehicle of God – is largely alien to our modern psyche, although perhaps not so much for Lawrence, who attempts to recreate an intense level of religiosity in his approach to Being, and who harnesses literary language in service to the task. But all is ironic parody in Ulysses, and therefore at the other end of the spectrum of the codes of ‘Oxen’, we find a nonsensical cacophony of modern colloquial voices, terminating in that of the American evangelist: ‘Come on you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers [ ... ] the Deity ain’t no nickel dime bumshow [ ... ] he’s on the square and a corking fine business proposition. He’s the grandest thing yet and don’t you forget it’ (561). The juxtaposition of these two styles found more or less at the beginning and the end of the episode thus highlights the shift of language’s relation to theological power. Where once, as suggested before, the symbology of language acted and contained God in a very real way, now language as a system of self-referencing symbols is deployed as mechanical rhetoric to induce belief in his existence in a secular era. The now defunct power of symbolism is further reflected in the empty talk of the men. Men are somewhat impotent here (in comparison to the birthing woman) and have resorted to telling stories, arguing about irresolvable matters, making bawdy jokes and anecdotes (Mulligan), exchanging drunkenly drawn-out and obsequious pleasantries in relation to the immediate distribution of alcohol amongst themselves (528), and concocting absurd schemes such as a ‘national fertilising farm’ for women (526). The translation of Mulligan’s Latin quotation also suggests a male sexual insecurity. The drunker the men get, and the more modern the styles, the less successful the linguistic grandeur proves at hiding both the crudity, and the banality of the men’s exchanges. The drunker the men become, the more they get caught up in the imaginary. Yet ‘Oxen’ also enacts its own symbolic overcoding: it reterritorialises the disoriented state of twentieth-century art/thought on old/new ground. It capitalises on the past; as Mark Osteen puts it: in ‘Oxen’, ‘Joyce both acknowledges the debts to his predecessors and makes literary capital from them.’49 This statement suggests the paradox of Joyce’s own approach. ‘Oxen’, perhaps more than any other episode, is an encounter with language as an abstract commodity which, by

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registering a history of language and intellectual ‘codes’, also implicates a modern state of language use under which, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, writing is ‘adapted to money as the general equivalent’. It is this latter historical stage in which language becomes functional to the point of being mechanical – an end in itself. To render language, style and form as abstract commodities, ‘Oxen’ decodes them and converts words into capital, in a ‘production for production’s sake’.50 Language is therefore cut adrift from the concrete authority of symbol and God (who has, by the end of the episode, officially died in the old sense) and shown to hang instead in a medium of the imaginary, which, on the whole, is structured economically. In this form language can be appropriated in any way, as is implied in the commercial style of the evangelist preacher, who emulates the capitalist state of language. The coming of the economic imaginary also involves a decrease in the real, which is exemplified in the descent of the conversation into drunken gibberish. Indeed the grip of the text on reality has been largely lost by the end of ‘Oxen of the Sun’; the way is now set for the ‘becoming-mad’ and for the pure surface of text and event. ‘Oxen’ is the episode where the two strands of the paradoxical double action are in most intense competition: hence the extreme recourse to tradition (reterritorialisation) and parody of tradition and of overcoding in general (deterritorialisation). In a similar way, Christy Burns suggests that ‘Joyce’s work repeatedly retraces a double gesture, one that both mimics the subject’s turn towards stereotypes and inscribes narrative ripples and ironies that draw attention to the absurdity of such aggressive representations.’51 As I have suggested, this double gesture concords with the anti-ideological politics of the ‘auto-critical’ text, which must construct and deconstruct simultaneously.

‘Circe’: the decoded imaginary Modernist readings of ‘Circe’ have often interpreted the episode’s outlandish scenarios and vignettes as symbolic of the literal realisation of all the psychological and sexual/desiring agendas of characters, Bloom in particular.52 These are manifestly symbolic and oedipal interpretations, however. Viewed machinically, ‘Circe’ is also a pure textual surface on which event and text finally unite. In many ways the episode is a textual and sensible dramatic performance, and to this extent is somewhat uninterpretable. Hence Hugh Kenner’s (modernist) reaction that ‘why “Circe” is needed at all is, on the mere narrative plane, not evident’.53 Yet in terms of our own exploration of Ulysses’ representational

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politics, it is ‘Circe’ which realises Deleuze’s notion that ‘everything happens at the boundaries between things and propositions’.54 In ‘Circe’ (which is written in the form of August Strindberg’s dream play) everything floats in a medium of immanent possibility for animation and simulation. Thus, in this new medium, the narrative adopts a tendential of infinite and pure possibility. The infinite realm of possibility includes multiplication and amplification. Crowds of diverse classifications of people, for example, materialise at any moment to assist the action, and the rich and fastidious detail of costume and setting change rapidly and frequently. The pure possibility is in the character of events. For example the ‘hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic [ ... ] tumbles in somersaults through the gathering darkness’ (623). We might link this strange creature to Deleuze’s conception of the ‘impossible objects’ incarnated in the absurd. He claims that the ‘impossible’ (paradoxical) objects of the absurd have a sense, but not a signifying location. They are objects ‘without a home,’ outside of being, but they have a precise and distinct position within this outside: they are of ‘extra-being’ – pure, ideational events, unable to be realized in state of affairs.55 Pure possibility is also the random recapitulation of the ‘real’ objects of Ulysses’ storyline along with ‘new’ ones hence Bloom pats ‘with parcelled hands’ his ‘watch, fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepocket, sweets of sin, potato soap’ (568). The narrative is revelling in silliness – in this instance playing with words, the idea of personal possessions and the reader’s expectation of reality; it is only the latter two we recognise as ‘real’ possessions of Bloom’s. There is also much jumbled recapitulation on a narrative level, hence the parody of a former parody (of the AngloSaxon style in ‘Oxen of the Sun’): ‘Beer beef battledog buybull businum barnum buggerum bishop’ (626). ‘Circe’ shows the innumerable ways in which narrative is able to have recapitulative, simulated fun at the expense of both the characters and itself. But the most instrumental pure possibility in ‘Circe’ is that all inanimate things and narrative propositions are immediately anthropomorphised; no sooner than they have appeared as objects, they come to life. Characters thus include: The Bells, The Gong, A Figure, The Voice (several instances), The Gaffer, The Loiterers, The Wreaths, The Watch, The Gulls, Longhand and Shorthand, The Dark Mercury, The Nameless One and The End of the World. Moreover, phenomena such as A Voice and The Dark Mercury come to life as signifying fragments rather than as the live things they designate. For example, ‘THE VOICE’ of a given

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character (660), emerges immediately as a scripted character in its own right before it is revealed to us to whom this voice belongs. Thus when Kitty, Florry, Lynch, Zoe and Virag speak from ‘offstage’ it is ‘THE VOICE OF KITTY’ which speaks. Similarly when a ‘dark mercurialised face’ appears (583), the character scripted is ‘THE DARK MERCURY’: thus parts of propositions are being anthropomorphised, here the quality of dark mercury itself, rather than the person it designates. In ‘Circe’ we therefore encounter an enactment of the decomposition of internal linguistic sense and hence of the order of reality. There is a reversal of what Deleuze terms the ‘good’ and ‘common’ sense of signification. ‘Good’ sense dictates that significatory units must move in a singular direction from the most to the least differentiated, whereas ‘common’ sense ensures the identification of each unit as part of a whole, thus on the latter count, any ‘name’ implicitly refers to and relies on another greater category than itself for its meaning, thus face which designates personhood, is the highest category of sense in ‘dark mercurialised face’. ‘Circe’ is reversing this process and subdividing the categories into their individual denotative parts; the episode is going in the direction of nonsense. These parts now occupy the realm that is prior to their construction in a category of meaning or sense as a whole ‘thing’. Therefore ‘Circe’ ‘has’ no meaning, it is a surface on which meaning plays. In ‘Circe’ both plot ‘meaning’ and linguistic meaning are now reduced to their rudimentary components, a flow of parts, rather than of wholes. It is a surface of decoded flows. Ian Buchanan notes that the ‘decoded text is one that cannot be interpreted because it no longer operates according to the rules of codes – surface and depth – but instead has become “axiomatic,” pure surface’.56 It is on the surface, according to Deleuze, that ‘the gift of meaning occurs, in this region which precedes all good sense and all common sense. For here, with the passion of the paradox, language attains its highest power’.57 In ‘Circe’, claims Marilyn French, ‘act, word, thing, and person not only have equal weight, but are consubstantial with one another’: they are univocal.58 Language and sense are a plastic material to be shaped into anything at all. The univocal medium surrounding all language and objects in ‘Circe’ also connects with Deleuze’s conception of sense as ‘aliquid’ and ‘at once extra-Being and inherence’ and as that which subsists on the boundaries between propositions and things.59 We can see the entities in ‘Circe’ as containing this ‘extra-Being’: they inhere only in their own sense, in their propositions, and these propositions are continually producing more sense by actualising (partial) qualities

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of themselves. This is perhaps an incarnation of Stephen’s new aesthetic vision of ‘gesture’ as opposed to ‘music’ or ‘odours’ as ‘a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm’ (564). Stephen, and the narrative of Ulysses both search for this deeper action of language, a structural rhythm that is univocity in the fullest sense. In the representational sense ‘Circe’ is machinic: immanently dissolving content into form. ‘Circe’ is one of Ulysses’ high points of deterritorialised nonsense, one of the novel’s ‘purest’ instances of playful becoming. The most absurd and joyful episodes of the novel like ‘Circe’ suggest the dangerous point at which capitalism confronts the schizophrenic limit that threatens the system with destruction, because the manner and force of deterritorialisation is so strong. Likewise, episodes like ‘Oxen’ and ‘Circe’ suggest the highest ‘revolutionary’ potential offered by the novel. I will turn finally to what the book offers us as the limitation of the imaginary social machine.

‘Ithaca’: the paradox of the imaginary Through the course of previous episodes, the novel seems to have increasingly forgotten that it indeed ‘is’ a book. The journey of sensible deterritorialisation is, to a large extent, over; language has shown what it can do. In the last two episodes before the coda, ‘Eumaeus’ and ‘Ithaca’, the language loses the overt linguistic play of previous episodes, but retains their delirium and their tendency for excess. These two episodes attempt to return us to the ‘civilised’, ‘human’ world but can do so only in a distorted way. In ‘Eumaeus’, it is verbal excess – a form of textual materialism – rather than a formal radicalism, which challenges the proximity of the text to the reality it mediates, whilst in ‘Ithaca’, both textual materialism and the bizarre effect of the form combine to obliterate almost entirely this important novelistic relationship. In ‘Eumeaus’, the content now becomes the antithesis of the preceding episodes: tediously explanatory and over-rationalised. ‘Ithaca’ is the crucial final episode in our capitalist-universal journey of language and sense. In my view, ‘Ithaca’ represents the (modern) imaginary at its most cynical and ironically advanced. Like ‘Circe’, in ‘Ithaca’ the human plot is the free floating ‘toy’ of the language, but unlike ‘Circe’, the plot in ‘Ithaca’ is more humanly and teleologically accountable to the mechanism of both the book and human life. After the wild and deterritorialised exploits of ‘Oxen’ and ‘Circe’, ‘Eumeaus’ and ‘Ithaca’ represent the text falling back on its ‘internal’ oedipal limit,

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reaffirming the mechanism. ‘Ithaca’ is the final and supreme machine of the dense network and sequence of machines – both radical and repressive – which have formed the text. In ‘Ithaca’ the narrative becomes-concrete in the same way in which in capitalism the abstract quantity of money becomes, paradoxically, concrete in the immanence of the capitalist field of production. Nicholas A. Miller, in his Deleuzian analysis of the episode, calls narrative in ‘Ithaca’ a ‘flow of material excess’.60 Miller sees ‘Ithaca’ as a ‘gushing textual cataract’ that involves a large ‘wastage of other information’. Miller conceives of the flows of question and answers in ‘Ithaca’ with their connections and disconnections as quantities, that are ‘physical, rather than representational’, insofar as they flow with and interrupt one another, like Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines.61 Yet for Miller this questioning style of text cannot provide an ultimate ‘answer’ to itself; it ‘does not come home’.62 But Deleuze is admiring of Joyce’s use of catechistic question and answer in Ulysses on this very count, arguing that the author is ‘able to give sense to a method of questions and answers which doubles that of problems – the Inquisitory which grounds the Problematic. The question is developed in problems, and the problems are enveloped in a fundamental question’.63 For Deleuze, a system of questions and answers equates with a positive, experimental process of knowledge formation. An answer always opens up the possibility for another question, and thus the system suggests a field of paradoxical relations that is infinitely productive. But as I suggested before, the capitalist machine runs on a similar logic of inconclusive perpetuation and paradox. Capitalism is always chasing its own limit and always pushing it further away: both displacing and immanently reconstituting it. Hence, argue Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field’.64 This condition of inconclusiveness is precisely capitalism’s mechanical perpetuation, and what makes it an insatiable machine. Self-recuperation (or full functioning) would impede the necessarily infinite process of production. There is indeed a strong sense in which after the insatiable deterritorialisation processes, Ulysses has passed the point where it can ‘come home’, as Miller observes. In the catechistic question and answer mode of ‘Ithaca’, it is almost as if we are right inside modernity’s machine of rationality and watching its workings. Compared to the joyfully deterritorialised linguistic experiments of previous episodes, ‘Ithaca’, although containing some redemptive, creatively problematising elements, cynically suggests the repression of this overly technicalised social machine. ‘Ithaca’ brings

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home to us the state of a civilisation in which all codes and forms – the human included – have become abstract quantities. In this decoded civilisation, both time and space are rendered ‘imaginary’ constructs and ‘Ithaca’ is the eerily supreme instance of a reality which for Deleuze and Guattari ‘is not impossible; it is simply more and more artificial’.65 But in terms of the book’s philosophical path of sense deconstruction that we have been following, ‘Ithaca’ is a completely logical step for the narrative to take, just as capitalism is the logical endpoint of civilisation, that which, claim Deleuze and Guattari, all history leads up to. In other words: that ‘Ithaca’ is completely anti-humanist is the point. We have seen the human become just another image to be circulated in the mechanical flow of the text, in the practice. A straightforward connection between word and reality, between theory and practice, has long been left behind. The modernist deconstruction of the form, and thus the theory of human, has been successfully achieved. ‘Ithaca’s’ protracted, awkward manner is an acknowledgement of the difficult leap required in trying to think the human in a contemporary setting. Again, the text demonstrates this awareness in a reflexively critical way; in ‘Ithaca’ the text seems aware not just of the state of civilisation, but of the part a text itself plays in the state of civilisation, by simply being an act of representation. In short, in ‘Ithaca’ Ulysses as a whole text has reached a profoundly ambivalent and paradoxical state. The mechanical style of the writing creates such a severe, schizophrenic duality between the language and the actual events that our access to the characters is greatly restricted. Hence: ‘Was the guest conscious of and did he acknowledge these marks of hospitality? His attention was directed to them by his host jocosely and he accepted them seriously as they drank in jocoserious silence Epp’s massproduct, the creature cocoa’ (791). The human is at its outermost limit; present, but marginalised, and nearly extinct. The rigidity of the style crystallises the two men in space and time, as if to designate their ‘limit’ as individuals, whilst the catechistic form itself, which invokes man’s highest achievements – religion and science – also enforces the general sense that we have reached the ‘limit’ of (male) civilisation. Yet the language shows signs of rebelling against the formality. Humour is used, hence, ‘jocoserious’ and ‘the creature cocoa’, and furthermore, language playfully succeeds in conveying the poignancy of the exchange between Bloom and Stephen. There is a rhythmic passing back and forth between the two men; a repetition that results in the portmanteau word ‘jocoserious’ that conveys the structural reality of two elements achieving a momentary

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union, like Bloom and Stephen. Moreover, this overly rationalised language is in fact (paradoxically) an appropriate vehicle for a cynically lived emotional life and a form of social and mental isolation that are both characteristic of modernity. Although at the height of its mechanism, the text is continually demonstrating its awareness of the paradoxes internal to language, sense and the capitalist machine in which this book has invested interest, and must be considered as the episode that consolidates the journey of these three phenomena. For Deleuze, to be in the zone of paradox is to be ‘present at the genesis of the contradiction’; paradox is the site of greatest potency.66 In ‘Ithaca’ paradoxes are both worked through linguistically – in creative play – as well as intellectually: the text is doing its own mathematics. ‘Ithaca’ is full of explicit doubles and instances of two-fold logic, of which the central instances inhere in the double of the form (catechism) and of the content (the presence of the two men), who are described as the ‘duumvirate’ with their ‘parallel courses’ (776). We find paradoxes everywhere, for example, that Bloom has a ‘full masculine feminine passive active hand’ (788) and that he is ‘assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman’ (858). There is also strong evidence of the parallel line model of paradox that, as I suggested in the previous chapter, is one of the key metaphysical structures at work in modernity. Stephen is ‘a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro-and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void’, whilst Bloom is ‘a competent keyless citizen’ who ‘had proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void’ (817–818). In ‘Ithaca’, we encounter the most advanced stage of humour in the journey of comical deterritorialisation the novel has been following – irony – a humour of what Joyce designated as his ‘narrative old’ style of Ulysses. Hence the wickedly parodic image of: ‘first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition’ (825). Even in this most mechanistic episode, Joyce’s writing retains the potency of its physical imagery and the humour that attends the treatment of the body. However, now the humour is in its most ‘distanced’ and imaginary form – irony – and correspondingly we are in the most ‘distanced’ episode of the book, in the sense of ‘Ithaca’ being our final encounter with the two male protagonists. Therefore the physical imagery seems to speak with a symbolic conclusiveness that the earlier primitive scenes of physical humour lack. In the above image there is,

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I think, a highly ironic general analogy being drawn between the men urinating, the catechistic and scientific rationalist method, and the state of male endeavour in Western civilisation. Miller has started to draw such a parallel, in noting that the association of ‘micturition with cultural production’ occurs with some regularity in Joyce’s work.67 Broadly speaking, ‘Ithaca’ suggests a subtle metaphorical laugh on Joyce’s part at man and all his achievement. Indeed ‘Ithaca’ presents us with an ironic, double-edged end to a book that has followed the same pattern. The episode suggests both the highest achievements and the limitations of Western society. Hence there is a pseudo-scientific ‘truth’ (of the kind we have been studying generally in the book) in the style and content of ‘Ithaca’, which meticulously traces its tracks as it slices clinically through the epistemological tissue of many topics, both sophisticated and banal. In so doing, the narrative in ‘Ithaca’ connects bodies, things and signs, as if to posit univocity. Most of what are thought of as humankind’s highest knowledge achievements concerning earth, time and space (or at least were thought to be at the stage of Ulysses’ writing) are touched upon in this episode and seem representative of the pinnacle of what humankind has been able to come up with in our short time on the planet. There is the sense that the more complex answers in ‘Ithaca’ are being (unofficially) postulated as the metaphysical ‘conclusions’ of Ulysses as whole. But there is also equally a negative face of this predominantly rationalised and mechanical state of man that I have all along been underlining. ‘Ithaca’ testifies to the partially impotent state of rationality. The fastidious taxonomising of the text implies that acts of reasoning and analysis have become ends in themselves, even when the actual object of these activities is unclear. This has as its corollary a writing of the imaginary capitalist mode that enacts the empty principle of transcendence, which increasingly stifles the human dimension and a modernity that is a – perhaps regressive, perhaps progressive – simulacrum of a former life.

Conclusion In this chapter I have mapped the complex imbrication of different types of machines at work in Ulysses. ‘Telemachus’ presents the book as ‘heuristic-machine’; the text immanently encoded with itself. The episode is like a retrospective simulacrum, which previews core qualities and features of the text such as the linguistic pragmatism, and future simulacra. ‘Telemachus’ portends the tension between a classical tradition, and a new, experimental one that is so important in Ulysses.

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Further, Joyce uses the classically influenced ‘rhythm of beauty’ to produce both his ‘initial’ style and the machinic pragmatism, and thus to process an aesthetic shift into experimentalism. Like Woolf and Lawrence, Joyce employs a machinic aesthetic to overturn the organic structures and to move away from the human form of the novel. Yet in Joyce’s case however, this organic deconstruction is far more rapid, and indeed taken to such an extreme degree that Ulysses frequently loses sight of its human content, as well as the human (realist) form of novelistic convention. In this way the text intimates to us the crippling aspects of a mechanical society. I argued that Joyce transformed the concepts of stasis and kinesis present in his organic heritage into a cinematic-machine of the text, thereby creating a ‘film’ of Dublin life. The cinematic quality of Ulysses suggests not only how deeply real machines and the mechanical principle have permeated life in the modern era, but also embodies the aesthetic affirmation of the wider change and mechanical permeation. The cinematic text compounded the textual preoccupation with the visual that continues throughout the book. In the ‘primitive’ writing of the text, which I argued, concords with Deleuze’s first machine of a universal history, Joyce writes the multiplicity of vital machines – animalistic and corporeal – that are found in urban Dublin life. I suggested that the politics of a primitive representation is that of a language viscerally connected to the world, not deterritorialised away from it. But what Joyce’s primitive machines reveal about the text (as indeed all the other machines will), is that although Joyce has gone to great lengths to encode the text with life, and put language in an extraordinarily close relation with the body, Ulysses is largely an exercise of textual hyperconsciousness: an exercise of mental control over vital life. In this way, the book works through a tension between the vital machinic and the abstract mechanical that is also at work in capitalism. The capitalist system circulates a degree/ image of qualitative freedom and difference that is not genuine insofar as everything is subject to the quantifying abstract of money. In Ulysses’ maze of concentric layers of machines, the next machine we encounter is the cynical machine, the book’s political ‘conscience.’ The text now reveals awareness of the duplicitous false consciousness or anti-belief of modern society, and, through both its mechanical practice and its human awareness, can be judged to be politically cynical in the same way. Next, in Ulysses’ central sections, it is the despotic machine of the text that ushers in the second representative mode of the book’s universal history. The symbolic writing displaces the represented world onto a signifier, pre-ordained representational style, or

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body of discourse. These sections, which culminate in ‘Oxen of the Sun’, are central examples of the reterritorialising component of the double-action that has been powering the text. ‘Oxen’ both embodies that period of history when life was subjugated to a transcendent power, of God or the word, but it also ushers out this despotism and machine of tradition, and ushers in the imaginary machine with its cynical and deterritorialised parodying. The humour and parody in this episode effect the last shift of the ‘vitality’ of the text away from that which is represented (the human, the plot), onto the pure mechanism of language itself. In ‘Circe’ we reach the imaginary machine and the height of the text’s deterritorialising, joyous activity. Here it is sense itself that is dissolved, and the text plays with fragments of its former life and simulates fantastical events. ‘Circe’ and ‘Ithaca’ together represent the double possibility of the imaginary mode: respectively revolutionary becoming (within language), and the cynical irony of mechanical limitation. ‘Ithaca’ also acknowledges the deeply paradoxical journey that has been followed. What the two great reterritorialised and deterritorialised states of language and writing in Ulysses confirm is that in the modern machine age writing is at an impasse; it is both alive and dead, vital and archaic. On a political level, the double-action points towards the current action of society that compounds the capitalist imaginary as an inevitable state of affairs. As in Lawrence’s Rainbow, in Ulysses there is a cyclical logic of history (a vehicle of univocity), that renders all social machines interconnected, and which can only, therefore, be indicative of the system which leads to capitalism. Indeed perhaps the most profound and useful message engendered in Joyce’s text for this book is of the inevitability of the imaginary and its abstract system of exchange, which utterly control how vital life, its codes and forms, are lived and experienced. Thus Ulysses brings us to the limit of modernity, to its dubiously neutral and cynical politics, and its surface, mental forms of circulation, which assert themselves over other modes of sense and being.

5 Ideas and Life in Conflict: Lawrence’s Later Works

In the previous chapter I used the formidable linguistic textual machine of Ulysses to steer our literary journey firmly into the modern era and to highlight modernity’s imaginary, universally historical state. Now my task will be to assess the later works of Lawrence and Woolf in the light of this imaginary machine of history, as it has been diagnosed in the shape of Joyce’s important work. Is the encounter with the imaginary in Lawrence and Woolf the same? Is the imaginary a state of freedom or impasse for them? Thus far, our machinic journey through the novels has taken us through the first major stage of modernism, the human, and into the second, the mechanical. In the first two chapters, I tracked the encounters of both Woolf and Lawrence with this first modernist stage and their respective processes of both celebrating and yet questioning the human and nature. I discovered that Woolf and Lawrence were similar in this stage of their journey: they both crafted authentic machinic becomings within the human sphere: they both introduced into their narrative some kind of mechanical element, either in theme or technique, and thus questioned the human as a value. Because Joyce utterly dispenses with the human, not only as form, but also as a value, Ulysses is the novel that firmly shifts this machinic aesthetic journey from the human experiments of Woolf and Lawrence into what I designate as the second, ‘mechanical’ stage of aesthetic modernism. Ulysses is the benchmark of what happens when the human is dispensed with, and what the precise nature of modernity’s mechanical activity is, following the human departure. The novel thus ‘answers’ some of the questions with which the other writers, especially Lawrence, left us. Ulysses confirms for us that machinic life in modernity is predominantly mediated by mental and visual mechanisms, which are the abstract economic systems of life. Joyce’s text enacts what Lawrence’s 127

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Rainbow implied: the predominantly mental consciousness of modernity that subjugates the unconscious body. But importantly, the reading of Ulysses also reveals the paradox of the machinic, by showing us that there is vitality to be found in a non-human sphere. A mechanically driven machinic is, in its own way, just as vital as a naturally, humanly driven one; vitality occurs under both conditions. By the same token, Ulysses also implies that there is no inherently positive or political evolution in a shift from an organic to a mechanical state of affairs because abstraction, mechanism, money, and the mind, which equate with one another, are now the hidden rulers of life. Thus the oppressions of organic politics are still in force, but cunningly operate from a more inscrutable – because immanently dispersed – location. In Ulysses we encounter the depth of modern life’s paradox. Thus in the ‘machine’ of this book, it is not until we reach Ulysses, a novel in which an abstract system – language – is absolutely primary (eclipsing human concerns), that the precise nature of the imaginary, the abstract social system, can be seen in full blown operation and assessed accordingly. The novel therefore forms a hinge point for the whole book. By bringing us into an encounter with the mechanical reality of writing, Ulysses forces us to reflexively confront the political, and even capitalist, ‘implications’ of writing. The most negative condition of the mechanical impasse of writing is that which dictates that any writing, including those that attempt to challenge the dominant system, explicit critique or pragmatic narrative for example, are also mechanistic. None of the three writers, Woolf, Lawrence or Joyce, can ultimately escape the mechanical aspect of writing because it is the mode of modern living and expression. But where Ulysses singularly confronts the paradoxical state of modern representation (and life), by contrast, the same journeys of paradoxical enquiry in Woolf and Lawrence appear in different forms, and are spread out over several works. As I have previously suggested, Lawrence is not as aesthetically collusive with the mechanical age as – certainly Joyce, and perhaps Woolf – are. Although he questions the value of the human, there is a strong sense in which he never relinquished the first organic stage of modernism. The end of The Rainbow posed the positive, hopeful question as to how far modernity and its surface ‘style’ of intellectual, sexual, education and professional mobility, as portrayed in the heroine Ursula, might offer a new form of freedom. The conclusion of this novel and Lawrence’s embarkation into writing the sequel coincided with a period of genuine hopefulness in him regarding modernity. Yet a pre-emptive glance at Lawrence’s whole journey in this book reveals that, unlike

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Joyce, this innate valuing of human life and sense that art should be used as medium for human welfare, ultimately always overrode his aesthetic concerns. In Lawrence’s later work we find that this battle with the vital and the mechanical comes to a head. He grapples with the impasse of time, history, and language, with the tools and constructs of civilisation as it stands, and a country that he desires so much to positively change. The years during and following the war were extremely troubled for him, and from 1916 onwards his negativity and ambivalence towards England intensified. The war raged, The Rainbow had been banned (late in 1915), he was unable to find a publisher for Women in Love, and he found himself living almost as a criminal in Cornwall, unable to leave the country as planned. All of these factors contributed to the particularly brutal modernist impasse in which Lawrence found himself as a writer and political thinker during this time, and which eventuated in the painful ideological defeat suffered at the end of his career. In this context, and on the basis of his human attachments, Lawrence’s encounter with the imaginary is a much more political affair than it was for either Joyce or, as I will show, Woolf. To a large extent thus, the hopeful view of modernity posed at the end of The Rainbow vanishes, and modernity is revealed as offering no redemption, but a purely destructive set of social conditions. Lawrence’s advance into dystopia was nevertheless gradual. The sequel to The Rainbow, Women in Love, is the next step of his struggle with human and mechanical concerns. In the previous chapter on Lawrence I documented the great wrenching of a semiotic and verbal state of life out of an unconscious and visceral one in The Rainbow. The novel was seen to monitor what was in reality an enormous cultural shift: from the perceived idyll of pre-industrial pastoral England, to the brittle intellectuality and industrialism of modernity, attested to by the decrease in the notable ‘metaphysical’ pastoral narrative. I suggested that the shift also inhered in the (modernist) temporal crisis, and in the tension between a passive and an active vision of history. It was the allotropic metaphysic that enabled Lawrence to at least accommodate the paradox of modernity, where Ulysses celebrated it. The Rainbow represented an about-turn in Lawrence’s vision; from organic nostalgia to tentative faith in the mechanical age. Women in Love heightens the stakes of the set of issues raised in The Rainbow by extending a simultaneously positive and a negative vision of the mechanical. Lawrence’s conception of a cultural shift from primitive to modern arose out of a duality which plagued him and thus came to define his

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whole artistic and philosophical modus vivendi: that between a non-mental or instinctive consciousness and a will-driven, mental one. As I have suggested, the distinction was so tied up with his personal beliefs, namely his vision of a state of spiritual and corporeal health to which the modern world was almost completely antithetical, that there was an enormous amount at stake in this transition into the imaginary for Lawrence.1 In Ulysses we observed the precise mechanics of the imaginary as they manifest in an aesthetic context, and to a lesser extent as a potentially denaturing mode of social life. But it is not until we engage once again with a more humanistic writer such as Lawrence that the full impact of the ambivalent and perhaps crippling effects of life in the imaginary mode can be felt and humanly assessed. Lawrence’s approach to the imaginary is two-fold: in Women in Love he engages in a brief but intense exploration and celebration of modernity, only to later turn away from it. Women in Love is a bridging novel; marking the end of the metaphysically powerful and positive vision of The Rainbow, and the creative beginning of the author’s negative trajectory. In its most exterior implication, Women in Love warns us of the ubiquitous transcendence we have settled for in modern life. Yet I should at this point briefly explain my proposed angle on Women in Love, a novel that has already commanded a large field of critical attention. I will focus on a central, but lesser studied creative theme of the novel: the enormous transformational physical journey undergone by words and ideas in the process of the transition to modernity, and their ability to not just reflect, but seemingly to physically compress, and enact the social, ontological and material ramifications of the imaginary. I will thus try to identify the changing mechanics of words, their ‘action’ on the world, and the extent to which it is, in Lawrence’s view, words and ideas which exile life in the modern imaginary era (subjugating the body and distorting the psyche). In the later part of the chapter, as a way of following this theme of conflict between words and life through the later stages of the author’s journey, I will focus the reading through the angle of two prominent narrative voices: what I call Lawrence’s inimitable ‘interventionist’ narrator and the voice of free indirect speech. My reading will explore the qualities and the mechanics of transcendence at play in these modern narrative voices. Unlike Joyce, who as we have seen, dealt in language as an abstract entity, Lawrence refused to submit to abstraction and aesthetic self-consciousness, and was inclined to examine and test exactly the nature of abstraction, of the surface, and of mental consciousness as they manifest in both language and life.

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Women in Love: ideas versus matter Critics are more or less unanimous that The Rainbow and Women in Love stand as Lawrence’s two finest works and that the latter represents the continuation of the allotropic method of The Rainbow to a more sophisticated level. In many ways, Women in Love seems no more than officially related to The Rainbow – containing only the factual continuity of the sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and marginal appearances by their parents, Anna and Will Brangwen. The style of the second work is indeed quite alien to the memorable mythical sections of its predecessor; it is brittle, dialogic, disparate, and manifestly ‘modern’. It presents us with a series of loosely connected scenes set in several locations including the Midlands (the birthplace of the Brangwen sisters), London and the Swiss Alps. Whereas The Rainbow was divided between the implicit metaphysic of the first half and the more individualistic, conscious subsequent modern half, in Women in Love the narrative speaks consistently from a fully conscious, determined ‘will’. From this transcendent position, as we will see, the narrative tells in two ways: metaphysically and intellectually. In Women in Love, Lawrence sought to work through his own fears and criticism of the era and England by formulating not simply a language, but a comprehensive ethos and a plastic metaphysic of disintegration. He took this, as I will show, to its astonishing end by fusing his vitalism with an abject fatalism; a marriage of what Colin Clarke sees as the ‘vital and perversely vital’. 2 To liberate a freer discussion, I would like to prepare the ground by outlining some of the novel’s core ideas about which critics are in general agreement. Women in Love stands as Lawrence’s most resounding literary attempt to impress, implicitly and explicitly, his cosmological view that modern humanity finds itself in a destructive-creative phase of a universal cycle. Hence the novel’s apocalyptic atmosphere in which two out of the four central characters, Gerald and Gudrun, are the human embodiments of this disintegrative phase and are accordingly defined by the behaviour and properties of mechanism, materialism and the will. The novel, following on from The Rainbow, is metaphysically premised on the conflation of these phenomena. This conflation, as I noted before, is the central metaphysical ground from which Lawrence conducts a diatribe against modernity. Gudrun and Gerald’s destructive relation, as Lawrence himself saw, signalled the effect of the First World War on the writing. 3 Yet these forces are counterbalanced by a hope for creative growth in the form of a relation of

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‘star-equilibrium’ that balances singleness and conjunction between Birkin and Ursula. It is partly my interest in this chapter to examine what the allotropic metaphysic initiated in The Rainbow evolved ‘into’ in Women in Love, the sequel. As I showed previously, allotropy denoted the existence of a single element in multiple forms, which, in terms of the Brangwen family, translated into a powerful familial phylogeny, regardless of the social and historical upheavals that were, in the context of the actual historical period, drastically altering the conditions of social, material, and spiritual life.4 In Women we find the sisters are still allotropic beings, equipped with universal forces and following almost cosmologically prescribed fates, as are other characters. The novel creates a spectrum of individual worlds that range from the critical and the despairingly fatalistic to worlds of constructive possibility. Several theorists have seen the novel from the standpoint of different ‘worlds’.5 The notion of ‘worlds’ in this respect equates with the theory’s identification of the presence of the new era of relativity, which was being advanced mathematically by Einstein in his acclaimed theory of special relativity in 1905, and which found expression in so much of the work of that era. Mathematical relativity described a vast transformative process that was taking place in all areas of life, no less than that of the sociocultural, affecting both the forms and the conditions of social life.6 One such quite realistic demonstration of this in the novel involves Gudrun’s awareness of the increasing social and professional relativity in the lateindustrial climate. It concerns an encounter between Gudrun’s world and the mining world, as she and Ursula walk through their district. Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large, grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid. (12) Here, Gudrun’s sense of relative worlds reflects her own class mobility. We might compare this relation to her territory with that of her ancestors (one and the same territory) in the memorable opening section of The Rainbow. The change presented by relativity is so radical and allencompassing that it poses a physical problem; she finds herself ‘quite unstable’; unlike her forebears, she has no visceral connection to her

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world. Moving between these social and economic worlds does not come naturally for Gudrun and indeed the multiplication of worlds confers an increasing sense of unreality. The different worlds are mechanically individualised machines, operating more or less autonomously from other worlds around them. Whereas Joyce saw fit to celebrate this very fact, for Lawrence, it is a much more suspicious development. Ironically, Gudrun’s connection to ‘real’ sensible things now comes not in the form of nature, but in her clothes, which accordingly are the most ‘natural’ things in the description, emphasised by the double occurrence of ‘grassgreen’. It is not inaccurate to surmise that for Lawrence, Gudrun’s experience here designates a more or less consistent ontological reality of being modern: that of always being slightly afraid, of one’s heart always being in a slight state of contraction. Here is also an example of the emotionally dense characterisation in the novel, in which each instance is a singular reflection of a kaleidoscopic whole diagnosis of modern consciousness. Although the transition to a new era is of course cumulative, in Women in Love we see a continuation of the allotropic technique in The Rainbow, of imbibing the individual emotional and mental responses of the characters with the compressed force of a much larger cultural process – hence the visceral severance from vital-organic life is enacted here in the space of a few lines. In a sense the battle for the continuation of the vital organicism was fought and lost in The Rainbow, and yet still now, it is as if Lawrence wants to make the text – right up into its modern era – subtly and continually accountable for this massive, cumulative shift from the primitive to the ‘civilised’. He simply does not want us to forget how much and in what way our consciousness has changed. The science of his writing, if it can be so-called, lies in this continual, molecular commitment to monitoring and reflecting on the extent of and the subtleties of this process. The difference between this novel and The Rainbow is that the latter retained some historical contingency and partiality in its processes, in the generative narrative rhythms, and in the sense always of something more to come. In the sequel, however, the narrative temporally compresses these cultural processes into finished ‘worlds’ (that are machines), and the feeling is apocalyptic. This is in keeping with the book’s modern fatalism in which the current era is one in which everything is known and the world is worn out. It is as if each ‘world’ of Women in Love not only has a considerable span of time compressed into it, a time within time, almost a ‘pure’ time, but also an ominous end of things. Many of the scenes and even short passages are charged with the logic of this apocalyptic metaphysic.

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Even from the outset, the wedding scene, in which all the major players are introduced, Lawrence charges them with levels of intensity of consciousness, to let us know that they are palettes on which something either remains to be worked or further extinguished. Thus Gudrun and Hermione are both, in separate instances on the same page, ‘scarcely conscious’ (15), and the latter is frequently referred to as tired. But this relativity of ontological worlds also holds that we do not measure or evaluate the characters by any consistent standard; they are discrete beings. Hermione is a case in point. She is accorded the most extreme and apocalyptic feelings from the outset. This is part of a deliberate move to relativise each instance of her being in reference to a scale that is fit to assess the extent of her spiritual devolution, and it is principally into her character that all of Lawrence’s antipathy towards modern society in this novel is poured. Through her we are in the closest proximity to the apocalypse: it is dramatised in her. In this way, the characters in Women in Love are an extension of the modern characters of The Rainbow in which the inhuman was integrated into the human in a cruel, intellectually self-conscious way. The dialogue brings this out: Birkin’s abnegation of his sick body which Ursula attacks as ‘criminal’ and ‘wicked’ seems no more strange than the vehemence of her ‘human’ response to it: ‘you ought to suffer, a man who takes as little notice of his body as that’ (196). For Birkin, ‘one is ill because one doesn’t live properly – can’t. It’s the failure to live that makes one ill, and humiliates one.’ (125) This is vital-organic determinism in action: it is Ursula, so often the character holding up traditional emotional and rationalistic values, who is just as fallacious in seeing the body as a kind of machine which needs to be tended. It is she who has separated body from mind and Birkin who presents the more advanced and vital view (that links to the vital metaphysic of the early Rainbow), insofar as he understands body and mind as holistically integrated. In Birkin’s terms the ongoing welfare of the body is wholly contingent on the welfare of the spirit. Emotions are deliberately unconventional in Women in Love; they are not temporal, but mystical. Thus Ursula’s hatred of Birkin is ‘pure and gem-like’ (198) and Gerald and Gudrun’s battles engage a cosmological, rather than a human process. The grand dimensions of emotional presentation in the apocalyptic characters, who carry the bulk of civilisation in their psyches, as I have already suggested, signal the larger order with which the whole text chimes. Whereas Joyce, by way of his linguistic emphasis, creates a large-scale linguistic universe to carry out his metaphysical experiment, Lawrence, in his textual materialism, enlarges and problematises the

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ontological and substantial dimensions of the consciousnesses of his characters as a way of implying the (creative-destructive) state of society at that point of a universal history. In this way, the metaphysic acts all at once as a mathematical and corporeal diagnostic analysis, and a code language for the chemical states of the cosmos. In her moment of crisis with Birkin, Hermione ‘could feel dissolution setting-in in her body’ (89) and also ‘she suffered sheer dissolution, like a corpse, and was unconscious of everything save the horrible sickness of dissolution that was taking place within her, body and soul’ (92). This repetition has the effect of absolutely branding the quality/idea it denotes into our consciousness and also makes words enact force, over sense, in a simulated way. We find it here with ‘dissolution’ and in an example later in Gudrun’s response to Gerald in the repetition of ‘soft’ and ‘subordination’. It reveals the words in their brute instrumentality: as individual units of pure, compressed force, marshalling and harnessing energy in a relative network of other, different word-units of force – again the allotropic technique. Whereas in the early part of The Rainbow we witnessed a glaucous, deferred, pulsating rhythm, which gained momentum and subsumed the Brangwen world in the vitality of narrative, in Women in Love words contain, calculate and enact energy both individualistically and relativistically. The allotropic style is the same as in the earlier novel, but here words enforce a world, rather than reveal it, as in the early part of The Rainbow. Words mathematically construct a world through defining its parameters and by setting it in relation to other worlds. Indeed in Women in Love, it is as if everything is already synthesised, already constructed and all that remains is that things/ words act on one another. For Lawrence, as for Deleuze, thought is a form of matter, and it is not just the nature of word-force, but of idea-force, which is one of the central themes underpinning the novel, and in an important way, his work in this later period. It was this peculiar and insidiously oppressive character of word-and idea-force which was also the subject of ‘Ithaca’ in Ulysses. The nature of word-and idea-force is implied in the passage concerning relativity and Gudrun in Women in Love discussed previously. In an ontologically relative world, each character’s world becomes conditioned by the ideal and limitative parameters of its own particular category, that is, it becomes a lived idea, as opposed to a lived experience of Being. Ideas drain the vitality from concrete experience and Being and operate independently of them. Now it is perceived to be great relative networks of complex and invisible ideas which run the world and send human beings flying around ‘treading in the air’ of their invisible networks.

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Consequently, Lawrence’s novel inadvertently questions how we can know ideas in a non-intellectual way – outside of their own terms that is. Unlike Woolf and Joyce, Lawrence is no longer (aesthetically) interested in confining thought to representation, but seeks to know, before anything else, what kind of acts representation and thoughts consist of. The novel starts by offering us a diagnostic picture of the texture of modern life as it is composed by this ideal/material dichotomy. In the opening chapters, we are left in no doubt of the degraded state of the world: we find all of the markers that signify an old, weary, cynical twentieth-century England. Early on Gudrun complains to her sister Ursula: ‘Everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid. It’s like being mad, Ursula’ (11). This is an inevitable response from Gudrun who is both an accomplished artist and degenerate cynic. Here is the idea that modernity can be defined as a process of (unclean) material repetition, merely a ‘replica’ of the real. It is a metaphysical conjunction that enables Lawrence, on one count, to assert that ideas and matter meet. In the metaphysical diagnosis of the modern, life is composed of two strata: the tyrannical spiritual reality of ideas, and that of subjugated material. In the event of this separation, mind and matter both become mechanically, homogeneously repetitive: the mind temporally repeats itself towards infinity, and matter acts to occupy increasing amounts of space. There is no depth to this process, because it is (reflexively) a matter of repetition; it is the perpetuation and the proliferation of the surface. As I have suggested, this is perhaps the principal metaphysical ‘action’ and logic at work in Ulysses: mental perpetuation and material proliferation, which are synonymous. Mental life is a chiefly calculating operation, designed to subjugate matter. In Women in Love, the calculating mind is emphasised as a perennially modern state of affairs: modern humanity and its created world are a degenerate and secondary unfolding of the material dimension of the universe, operating under relatively simple laws, and as such are part of the present disintegrative stage of evolution. Rupert Birkin speaks of modern people as ‘papiermaché realised selves’ (44), as an ‘intolerable burden of myriad simulacra of people’ (127), and of humanity as ‘a huge aggregate lie’ (126). Birkin (often seen as the novel’s incarnation of Lawrence) is the character who offers the most extensive and radical critique of the exhausted state of modern reality. During a gathering of his peers he reflects how known it all was, like a game with the figures set out, the same figures [ ... ] the same figures moving round in one of the

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innumerable permutations that make up the game. But the game is known, its going on is like a madness, it is so exhausted. (99) The most sophisticated sets are those who are most fatigued: the short time spent by himself and his friend Gerald Crich with the artistic Bohemian set in London starts convivially, and yet quickly descends into bad-feeling and confrontation, implying that the current state of man’s sociality has expired its effectiveness, and is near to nervous collapse. Hence Birkin sees in the manservant’s face the ‘ash of corruption, the aristocratic inscrutability of expression a nauseating, bestial stupidity’ (80). Birkin’s erstwhile lover, the upper-class Hermione Roddice, is the figure most representative of this weary civilisation overburdened with history and culture: she is a ‘pensive, tortured woman’ who ‘piled up her own defences of aesthetic knowledge, and culture, and world-visions, and disinterestedness’ (17). Moreover, she embodies the modern (early capitalist) society of acting believers (and false consciousnesses) whose beliefs are devoid of content: she is ‘a priestess without belief [ ... ] condemned to the reiteration of mysteries that were not divine to her’, haunted always by the sense that the ‘old great truths had been true’ (293). Yet Hermione’s pathological cynicism, her oratory, her self-righteousness and nostalgic sense that the ‘old great truths had been true’ bring her extremely close to Lawrence himself (of which he was himself aware7), both in his primitivist leanings and his own strong and domineering will, which thereby exposes the purely moralistic foundation of his argument. Critics have much praised Lawrence’s portrayal of inorganic life and of the disintegrative processes in Women in Love. Lawrence, that great writer of process and flow, used this novel as the stage for a spectacular display of warlike destructive energy. The Gerald/Gudrun relationship is the hub of this. Lawrence wants us to be shocked by Hermione, Gerald and Gudrun. He wants us to feel just how strange this modern world we have created really is, how much we have normalised it, when in fact modernity is far from normal. Therefore in Gerald and Gudrun, Lawrence formulated a highly distinctive ‘science’ of destruction and of the inhuman, with which we are continually bombarded. Indeed the lovers’ competitive, chemical ‘operation’ on one another is almost schematic and as if mathematically plotted. Hence for Gudrun, Gerald was wonderful like a piece of radium to her. She felt she could consume herself and know all, by means of this fatal, living metal. She smiled to herself at her fancy. And what would she do with herself,

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when she had destroyed herself? For if spirit, if integral being is destructible, Matter is indestructible. (396) The battle with Gerald (which she wins) is nearly finished in this instance – and Gudrun is as if licking her lips. But this comes at the end of a phantasmagoria of tyranny between them in which we see that Gerald symbolises the white races, which have the ‘arctic north behind them’ and thus his destiny is to ‘fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation’ (254). The chemical-material language is particularly applied to him: hence the ‘whitish, electric gleam in his face’ (241), ‘his living radio-active body’ (332) and ‘living metal’ hands (402). Gudrun matches his inhuman: her voice ‘like a seagull’s cry’ (241) and her ‘mocking white-cruel recognition’ (242), although more attention is paid overall to her mind, than to her ‘properties’, as with Gerald. A language of laboured repetition, intense materiality and a sense of crisis often attend the couple. Hence in Gerald’s body we see ‘a sort of soft white magnetic domination from the loins and thighs and calves, enclosing and encompassing the mare heavily into unutterable subordination, soft blood-subordination, terrible’ (113). This kind of hyperbolic description, with which the novel is replete, can be arduous for the reader. If it is Joyce’s proliferation that overbears, in Lawrence it is the hyperbole, and yet one feels it is again part of his intention to unsettle the reader, and push us out of ourselves. Women in Love elaborates the inhuman project initiated in The Rainbow to a more intrinsic level; hence the ‘soft white magnetic domination’ and the compound word ‘blood-subordination’. As I suggested before, it is as if now the characters are dealing with the forces of the universe in its more complex and subtle configurations, states of corruption and chemical transmutations. In its scientific way, the text recedes and involutes into the depths of the psychological and chemical processes, in a process that David Lodge suggests ‘is not really moving forward to encompass new facts, but unfolding the deeper significance of the same facts’.8 As I have suggested before, all of these reactions and processes are as notes sounding in the text on a vast scale of the human/inhuman. Yet the phenomenon of discussion and debate, with which the novel is replete, is also one of these ultra-sophisticated universal processes, and the process of coming into consciousness (which we will touch on later) is its aim. Hence the complexity of different modes used above: as if we were not mystified and inexplicably affected enough by the strangeness of ‘soft, white magnetic domination’ and ‘soft blood-subordination’, than we are further assailed by the rhetorical exclamation of free

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indirect speech: the narrator’s ‘terrible’ following it. The ‘terrible’ emotionally confirms our sense of horror, but does not demystify it for us, does not explain it. The material mode is what is apparently strange, and the conscious, discursive mode is apparently familiar, but in what way do we really know the latter? It seems just as alien in this novel. In this way the narrative makes continual and vast ontological and phenomenological leaps between its worlds – without making any effort to reconcile the gaps – and the reader must leap each time with it. In doing so, by setting semiotic against material reality so strikingly, it is showing us just how much we assume in our semiotic reality, how much we have normalised it, and how much we have subjugated and alienated the material. Overall, there is no such thing as humanistic narrative in Women in Love. There are (Deleuzian) blocks of phenomena – material-phenomena and word-phenomena. These are in the same style and seemingly of the same metaphysical intention as those flows of words in ‘Ithaca’, where as we remember, words were flows of material excess which served to highlight the mechanistic nature of thinking and writing in the imaginary stage of modernity. In Women in Love the word/idea phenomena take the form of a series of lengthy, esoteric discussions. This juxtaposition of raw forces/elements with ideas conveys the idea that the mental life (of words and ideas) is but one mode of a much greater body of vital force, and that talking and debating has little more ‘human’ status than forces and materials. Women in Love is by all accounts a highly constructed work and impersonal in a similar way to Ulysses; coldly and boldly modern and uncompromising, and working off inorganic processes. Yet to a large degree, the novel also itself functions within an imperial domain of words and ideals, and thus, although my reading so far might seem to imply that the judgement dealt to modern idealism in Women in Love is ideologically, if not aesthetically, negative, this is actually far from the case. Women in Love is a great discursive network of ideas and counter ideas, drawn from Lawrence’s own ambitious fund and a strongly dialogic exploration of new ways of knowing. In this exploration, it is epistemological processes, as opposed to conclusions, which take precedence. The whole work is a demonstration and a selffulfilment of its own central idea: of the value of coming into consciousness and the idea that the way through the modern dilemma is necessarily through intellectual knowledge, through the creation of one’s own knowledge-machine. It is Rupert Birkin who mediates this process and who defines it thus: ‘There is no new movement now, without the breaking through of the

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old body, deliberately, in knowledge, in the struggle to get out’ (186). An articulate, redemptive male figure, he has the skill of becomingimperceptible: he masks his ‘clever and separate’ nature, and prevents attacks on his ‘singleness’ by affecting ‘a verisimilitude of ordinary commonplaceness’. He must embark on a journey that sees him evolve from his self-travesty, his subordination ‘to the common idea’ (20) to a state of fulfilled and open separateness, in a relation of ‘star-equilibrium’ with a woman. Yet it is Birkin’s intellectual processes as much as their results and destinations, which are highlighted, and in which ideas are acting inconsistently as well as imperialistically, and are exhibiting their fallibility as much as their prowess. He is as inauthentic as he is original, as false as he is sincere. Thus Birkin is disingenuously compliant with social situations, somehow too accommodating: Ursula is ‘amazed and indignant at the way he made small-talk; he was adept as any fat in Christendom’ (298), and yet this social grace is ‘affected’ and somehow ‘never quite right’ (158). His real nature is mercurial and protean, hence Gerald’s notices ‘Birkin’s eyes were at the moment full of anger. But swiftly they became troubled, doubtful, then full of a warm, rich affectionateness and laughter’ (59). He is thus both a simulated and ‘natural’ person, with the potential for falling wholeheartedly into either. Indeed Birkin is dangerously close to being a time-worn creature of dissolution like Gerald, Gudrun, Hermione and Loerke: in him, the line between the spiritual decay and generation is extremely thin. He himself knows that he is ‘so nearly dead [ ... ] so near to being gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death’ (369), if it were not for the marriage with Ursula. Every scene in which Birkin is present involves a discussion or reflection of considerable profundity. He is always within a pulsing web of relations. Yet what makes him, sermonising and all (and indeed the interpersonal and mystic processes of the whole novel) a compelling presence, is that, in addition to containing dogma, his thought-paths and formulations are experimental, self-doubting and-questioning, ambivalent, often unresolved in the long run, and spontaneous. They are the ‘alert’ scientific practice – provisional, rhetorical – that allotropy has been to language and ontology in this novel and in The Rainbow, but this time in ideas. For example, Birkin is seized by the problem of ‘love and eternal conjunction between two men’ (206), whilst not so long prior to this we were assured that neither he nor Gerald had ‘the faintest belief in deep relationship between man and man’ (34). Pertinent critics also surround Birkin. Ursula is set in scrupulous counterpoint to him, in knowing that his ‘fine words’ are but acts of force and therefore amount to ‘bossiness’ (150). She recognises his ‘Salvator

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Mundi’ (128) quality of always trying to save the world and his ‘priggish Sunday-school stiffness’ (129), which she hates. Her emotional intelligence illuminates his blind spots and self-contradictions: most importantly she intuits in him both a lack of the singleness he preaches (363), and a lack of belief in his own theories. The truth is somewhere always in-between in their partnership. In addition to this, Gerald all but accuses him of megalomania (104), of which Rawdon Lilly is also accused in Aaron’s Rod. The instance in early courtship with Ursula when Birkin ‘would take no notice of her. He was talking to himself’ (147) echoes Oliver Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover who in his most opinionated moments ‘was really talking to himself (221)’. It is Gerald who notes that Birkin wants only his ‘ideas fulfilled’ (289). One of Birkin’s shortcomings is to put an experience into words before he has even had the experience. For Birkin, indeed for all of Lawrence’s redemptive male figures, words and language are tools of redemption, but also their weakness and their limitation. Thus Birkin, and to a lesser extent Ursula’s journeys come to consist of synthesising new intellectual knowledge and shedding the old, in this crucial process of coming into consciousness. As such they are the novel’s redemptive figures. But this also marked a significant turning point for Lawrence himself in which he had arrived at a more complex apprehension of the nature of knowledge and thought. Lawrence had acknowledged, as Daniel J. Schneider claims, ‘that “true knowledge” may depend to some extent on conscious and verbal elements; it is not merely unconscious and pre-verbal. In truth, it must be both conscious and unconscious’.9 As I have been suggesting, the struggle into consciousness (or what we have been seeing as an incorporation of a mechanical element into consciousness) was very much part of Lawrence’s journey as writer, as well as the journey of his central characters. In Lawrence’s case the struggle brought about a significant genealogical shift that caused his work to change immeasurably. It is important that we understand, as is inferred by Schneider, that this was not a process of banishing the mind altogether, but of ousting it from its self-appointed supremacy.10 I have explored how the metaphysic of Women in Love enacts the practical process of this ousting: on a representational level, the verbal/ideal dimension is demoted from its superior status and levelled with the realm of forces and materials. On an ideological level, moreover, the sophisticated intelligence of Birkin uses mental consciousness as an inroad into non-mental knowledge. It is the experimental and diverse nature of this ideal ‘laboratory’ in Women in Love which, in placing onus on the positive potential of ideas,

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prevents the text from being overly didactic and imperialistic, as Lawrence’s later novels would prove to be. In this novel Lawrence went to considerable lengths to explore and enunciate the mechanics of the increasingly dominant (as he saw it) surface – the intellectual, the wilful – from which modern life operated. The book’s engagement with a profound idea of process, and its complex equivocation about modernity, make Women in Love the strongest, in the eyes of many critics, of Lawrence’s ideologically accented works. It records the author’s distinct method for using fiction to formulate ideology, which includes an awareness of the dangers of this process of bringing ideology to fiction; by supervising and testing this possibility. Moreover, Women in Love is also an incredibly thorough portrait and a measure of all the criticisms that can be waged against Lawrence himself. For example, Birkin’s declaration that he is not interested anymore in people and personalities because ‘none of them transcended the given terms’ (305) is a foreboding of Lawrence’s own shortcomings: neither will the author himself be able – not, at least, in writing – to transcend the given terms. Indeed Women in Love enacts the failures of the modern social machine as much as it enacts its function and its potencies. The novel itself does not escape from the modern condition of being a brilliant, but ultimately bodiless and thus disingenuous vision insofar as it is unable to escape the pitfalls of the representational surface. Correspondingly, Michael Bell sees the novel’s lack of ontological depth, or of an ‘appropriately created “world” ’, principally in scenes which pertain to the novel’s positive vision of a conscious relatedness, such as between Birkin and Ursula, as rendering their rhetoric as ‘not so much meaningless as spinning in a void’.11 For example the description of Birkin as an Egyptian Pharaoh has no depth or ontological potency to communicate the powerful apex of experience it denotes for him. The greatest positive ideas of the novel depend on the thin transparency of a purely intellectual surface that cannot translate into reality. Drawing impetus from a comment Lawrence made about Cézanne and his capacity to construct a landscape out of omissions, Maria DiBattista argues similarly, that ‘despite its efforts to imagine and realize a “new thing” ’, Women in Love ‘comes to rest on the fringe of the complicated vacuum of novelistic cliché’.12

Voices of freedom and of mechanism in the later works Women in Love stands alone as Lawrence’s last great attempt to exploit the creative capacity of ideas, and to explore the space between words

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and life. In the powerful sequel to The Rainbow, we found, in a similar way to Ulysses, a multiplicity of representational machines, and contrasting stances towards modernity. In Women in Love we encountered a complex representational situation: a blend of narrative pragmatics and conscious voices, both critical and positive, an enormous amount of criticism and resistance to language, and yet a wholehearted willingness to embrace it. The novel was Lawrence’s last attempt to explore a politics of representation in the context of its entwinement with life on such a broad and yet integral level. To a strong degree we can read this deeply ambivalent stance towards modern life in Women in Love on Lawrence’s part as proportionate to the deep paradox of modernity and the imaginary, of its freedom and its bondage, which I have technically explored in the context of Ulysses. It was as if, at the stage of writing Women in Love, Lawrence was giving himself the room to be creatively bewildered by this paradox. In the work following the trauma and watershed of the Great War, we enter the most ideal phase of Lawrence’s creative oeuvre. In these later works, Lawrence is now exploiting the mechanism of his own voice and will as an instructive, didactic force. Metaphysical and idealistic uncertainties have all but vanished from these later novels and, unsurprisingly, they contain little allotropic or pragmatic narrative. Indeed the advent of his so-called ‘leadership’ novels, in tandem with his prolific non-fictional work, actually represents Lawrence’s return to the symbolic-despotic machine of writing and ideology. It is as if, in order to stay afloat and wield the influence he sought, the author himself had to start dealing solely in the currency of the ‘head’ – in wholes: whole thoughts, qualities, concepts, singular motivations, whole moral systems, and strong, individual, chiefly male, voices. The most pervasive of these voices is the creator himself. It was out of this same era of The Rainbow and Women in Love that Lawrence’s polemical writing evolved. The latter has often considered to have been triggered by the disgust and anger the war produced in him.13 The faith in the positive power of ideas communicated in Women in Love became a formal reality in Psychoanalysis- and Fantasia of the Unconscious, The Crown and The Study of Thomas Hardy. Lawrence was starting to take personal responsibility for trying to change the thinking of modern men and women. Yet in the context of novel writing, which he still saw as his greatest means of conveying his message, neither a redemptive love-relationship, nor a demotion of the intellect by the aesthetic doctoring of words and ideas, was going to effect the wide-scale change in thinking he wished for. In order to become a political force,

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his modern tactic of combining ‘being and knowledge-of-being’,14 had to be moved out of the sphere of individual or aesthetic influence, and applied to the social collective. In this context Lawrence substituted the novelistic creativity of allotropy with two salient techniques, which embody his double-edged stance to the new mechanical age. One of these was a partial concession to a mechanical and a modernist aesthetic in the form of free indirect speech. Hence the following excerpt from his long short story England, My England, written in this same post-war period, that focalises a dissatisfied wife’s view of her ineffectual husband: ‘It was that he stood for nothing. If he had done something unsuccessfully, and lost what money they had! [ ... ] Nay, even if he had been wicked, a waster, she would have been more free’15 (13). In free indirect speech narrative viewpoint frequently blends empathically with character viewpoint. As Randall Stevenson argues, it is the merged and intermediary aspects of free indirect speech that allow the novel ‘a certain freedom of suggestion, a possibility of statement precisely located neither with character nor author, but as if drawn from the whole atmosphere or situation the narrative develops’.16 In Lawrence’s case this is often seen as his ‘prophetic’ style. Free indirect speech is ambivalent; it is part political criticism, part aesthetic technique. It puts the narrator in a position of optimum control, of knowing more than the characters and of having great freedom for comment and speculation. In terms of what we have been evaluating as the changing quality and ‘action’ of words in each writer’s oeuvre, free indirect speech represents the most normalised, yet the most omnipotent, overlay of ideality of all: in which a transcendent image of life is extracted and operates with great autonomy and dexterity. It is the liberated (machinic) voice of the imaginary machine that is pointed towards by the narrative style of ‘Ithaca’, which can mechanically and ironically circulate a multiplicity of codes or forms of truth about life without assuming any definite political or moral stance towards them. Free indirect style, argues Dominick LaCapra, involves a comprehensive narrative movement within a text of modulated perspectives; a singular ‘voice’ that can consist of ‘the combination of objective narration, quoted dialogue’ and ‘interior monologue’.17 Free indirect speech allows for the multiple points of view (difference) in a relative modern world. Instead of working from different levels of ontological being, free indirect speech works purely from a surface of mental consciousness, but creates difference and dynamic by altering the spatial position from which it speaks. In the case of England, My England free indirect speech

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unfolds the divergent typology of the protagonist Egbert, his wife, and her father, who supports the couple in the light of Egbert’s inadequacy. The style enacts the relative world of each character’s will. From Lawrence’s point of view, this is a sign of the deadness of idealism: when social life has fragmented into hermetic individualised perspectives (a network of machines) that compete for precedence. Subsequently, in order to politically counter what he saw as the mechanical tyranny and moral chaos of a willed modern life, Lawrence turned to the hierarchical idea of a male blood-fellowship, the subject of the ‘leadership’ novels.18 Aaron’s Rod represents the first real attempt to test and formulate these political ideas and practices in a fictional work. At the time of writing Aaron’s Rod – Lawrence started it in approximately the beginning of 1918 and it was published in 1922 – he was still deeply disillusioned with Europe, and the war raged in his writing long after the Armistice of 1918. That the novel took him three years to write suggests its importance for Lawrence. The second central technique cultivated by Lawrence in this post-war period, which was an axiom of his political agenda, is what I call his ‘interventionist’ narrator, a narrative voice who makes a strong appearance in Aaron’s Rod. The novel tells the story of Aaron, a primitive, non-intellectual, yet intelligent man who embarks on a troubled journey of abandonment of his oedipal roots in order to search for new meaning and direction in life. This meaning will emerge as a male leader, a superior man. In the extraordinarily self-reflexive, mid-point of the novel, there is an extended shift into this narrator. In a solitary moment of his journey, Aaron is ‘painfully transmuted’, and drops his ‘conscious mask’, and his ‘complete and satisfactory idea of himself’.19 The narrator steps in and rather haughtily informs us: his deepest ideas were not word-ideas, his very thoughts were not composed of words and ideal concepts [ ... ] his thoughts and his ideas, were dark and invisible, as electric vibrations are invisible no matter how many words they may purport. If I, as a word-user, must translate his deep conscious vibrations into finite words, that is my own business. I do but make a translation of the man. He would speak in music. I speak with words. (199) The main agenda underlying this curious interjection is to protect Aaron’s individual integrity, which must crucially be seen as no less sophisticated or worthy for being non-intellectual. Perversely then, this curious anti-narrative stance attempts to shield the protagonist from

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the perceived tyranny of words and ideas of the very same novel in which he is spawned. The narrative will has become explicitly instrumental. This is another, but this time – unlike Women in Love – conscious narratorial strategy to demote the mental life from its self-appointed supremacy, suggesting again the idea that was under continual development in this stage of Lawrence’s thinking: that if we are to use mental consciousness, we must be thoroughly conscious that we are doing so. Lawrence is aware of the reaction such outspokenness might induce in his reader. We are further warned not to ‘grumble’ at him for Aaron’s simplicity, nor to be judgmental of Aaron’s clear lack of ability to ‘think all these smart things, and realize all these fine-drawn-out subtleties’ (199). Lawrence’s dominant narrator is right to anticipate our dissent, but wrong to assume it stems from our sense of Aaron’s primitivism. For it is the politicised treatment of characterisation in Aaron’s Rod and the shift in narrative role it entails which is the real measure of the reader’s disappointment. In a politicised narrative, words are used in their most sterile and mechanical capacity, in such a way as to not reveal the wondrous, metaphysical quality of the experience, with which previous narratives have been so charged. The mere words ‘electric vibrations’ of being, ‘night-lustrous and unseeable’ (199), and ‘plasm’ (198), are a poor substitute for the ontological experience. Moreover, Aaron has not been substantially developed enough to justify his dropping of his mask and his ‘idea of himself’ (198) as we are told he does here – he has always been rather invisible and insubstantial. Characters are as the author chooses to write them, regardless of whether they are intellectual beings, as previous characters like Tom Brangwen senior in The Rainbow demonstrate. Yet the purpose of this scene ultimately is to make an important distinction between the value of the right kind of hierarchy – the submission of ‘the lesser to a greater man’ (the latter incidentally being an intellectual and the former a non-intellectual) – and the comparative tyranny of the wrong kind of hierarchy, inhering in the idealistic agenda of the writing and reading process. In a male fellowship the leadership of the greater man enables the individuality of the lesser man. In the same way that we have observed previously in Lawrence’s early Brangwens and Woolf’s Ramsay marriage, in the male hierarchy of Aaron’s Rod machinic individuality is licensed by way of the organic structure. In both The Rainbow and To the Lighthouse machinic becomings and relative autonomy were possible within a dominant and yet positively supportive organic structure. However, it is clear that

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Lawrence has not found in modernity and its idealistic mechanisms the means for the kind of visceral political change he had hoped for. The corporate idealism of modern life fails to foster and support the individuality of the lesser man, but simply subjugates him. Thus in his political writing, Lawrence seems to be attempting to reinstate a model of the simultaneous interdependence and individuation of the primitive society of The Rainbow in which human life thrives by way of its dependence on a higher term of reference. He has not abandoned his conviction and reverence for natural/human vitality, but instead formulates this strategy that he believes will serve to protect it. This commitment to vitality was already present, as I argued in Chapter 2, in the nature of the allotropy as a visceral, corporeal intuition. The bloodfellowship represents Lawrence’s developed political solution to the problem of trying to preserve this vitality/corporeality. We might thus define this conscious strategy of the reinstatement of organic structure on Lawrence’s part as ‘organic-machinic’; as the use of (Deleuzian) organic belief in the attempt to preserve machinic, vital life.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover: the deified narrative machine I have suggested that the style of free indirect speech is a tool of creative synthesis in a modern world of relative value, whose social currency is primarily idea-based, and where difference has become the dominant logic. Free indirect speech enables a new ironic vision of the human as fallible and limited in the face of greater powers and forces. For all these reasons, free indirect speech is a textual practice conforming to a mechanical logic that is dominant in the modern age. As I showed previously, the flexibility and multiple sympathies of the narrator of free indirect speech focalises, both inside and outside of the text, the event of moral relativity that attends modernity. In this context the narrator is free to construct antipathetic, sympathetic, or on the middle ground, ironic characterisations by employing an internalising viewpoint. The moral relativity of the modern world was not problematic in Women in Love because the novel conducted a living debate surrounding it, as both conscious and unstable. The narrative was, in other words, the very embodiment of this relativity, a simultaneous depiction and an enactment of relativity and the vast ontological disparities it produces. But, as I have suggested, after Women Lawrence would never again make such creative concession to idealism, but concentrated instead on trying to re-establish an inviolable moral order.

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In Lady Chatterley’s Lover we find the two voices: ironic free indirect speech and the dominant, direct narrator. Indeed these are the main literary devices of the novel, which Lawrence largely uses diagnostically. The free indirect style necessarily focalises a world of multiple, relative subject positionings. But a dominant narrator is also needed in order to maintain a tight moral leash on this relativistic world. Hence the text is the most calculated and economic we have seen of Lawrence’s, and more than this, it is oedipal, insofar as Lawrence all at once proposes, exploits, and negates the modern world. Especially in the opening sections where he is setting up this world, and exposing the dysfunction of the modern characters, Lawrence exploits the lack of distinction between narrator and character in free indirect speech to masterfully ironic effect. Hence the description of the upper-class Clifford Chatterley’s sister who was ‘still disgusted at her brother’s defection, had departed and was living in a little flat in London’ (13). The economy of this style is extremely effective at conveying the emotional repressiveness and the belligerent arrogance of the upperclass attitude in defeat. The narrator is telling us but the language is ‘being’ that character. Linguistically, the successive ‘d’s initiated by the ‘disgust’ carry the disgust pompously through the sentence, telling us that Emma is the sort of person to be fuelled by disgust and the bearing of grudges, whereas the alliterative ‘l’s initiated by ‘little’ carrying through the ‘little flat in London’ suggest that her actual life is rather diminished and pitiful, in contrast to her high opinion of herself. My final analysis of the mechanics of free indirect speech is as follows: it creates a charmed intersubjective space within the text by working off interactive movement between narrator, character and, in the case of Lawrence’s interceptive narrator, also the reader. By way of its freedom of mobility between reference points, the instrument of distinction (the transcendent narrator) both generates and is subsumed in the affective space of the text. Free indirect speech (and style) are thus a truly imaginary aesthetic form, in being both the medium and the message, in circulating machinic difference, but in conforming to mechanism. The voice exercises control by naturalistically concealing itself in the content of the text. Thus free indirect speech is a submerged form of critique that is cynical in the capitalist sense explored in the previous chapter; it knows (implies), without having to do (speak directly). The narrator of free indirect speech is synonymous with a system in which power has become decentralised and obscured, in the way observed previously in the narrative tactics of Ulysses. Indeed it is common for modernist and other writers to collude in this mechanical

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politics, in which the narrator’s presence is concealed or merely ironically alluded to by way of a ‘writerly’ dimension of the text. Woolf and Joyce, for example, never explicitly insert themselves into their narratives in the same way as Lawrence. Thus the politics of their writing remain implicit, insofar as they are largely submerged in aesthetic processes, although in Woolf’s case this submergence, as I will reveal, is a paradox in itself. For this reason it is not entirely possible to label Woolf’s aesthetic as unequivocally mechanical as Joyce’s is, and thus as politically complicit with the modern system of power. But for Lawrence, in entirely the reverse manner to Joyce, aesthetics and the novel are the temporary vehicles of an organic, ideological project. He partly employs modern aesthetic practices to advance the ideological project insofar as by way of them he can reveal the putatively corrupt style of power in the modern system. He both employs free indirect speech to expose the false freedom of the modern world, but adopts a more dominant voice to counter what he sees as the moral chaos of a society of indirect voices. This dominant voice does not just imply, like free indirect speech, it (politically) does, by speaking directly; it makes the polemical process explicit. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, this explicit voice has become deified, and is given to sweeping diagnoses. The most significant instance of these narrative interventions constitutes the point at which Lawrence the novelist lays his cards on the table. Hence: even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. (101) Lawrence speaks directly to us now, in an attempt to morally counter what he sees as the superficial talk of modern existence. Gossip, one of the types of talk in the novel and symbolised by the character of Mrs Bolton, is a thrilling form of narrative, and yet it is damaging for the listener as well as the subject – it vivifies neither the world nor us. Yet this narrator looks more favourably on writing than he of Aaron’s Rod. Writing has its own moral obligations to uphold, and an internal stratification. One might argue that the danger here is that this dictatorial, explicit awakening of our awareness to the unconscious techniques of writing could perhaps diminish the effectiveness of the affective appeal to our ‘sympathetic’ centres, but I tend to think not.

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There is a sense in which the success or failure of such a dominating narrator is a matter of proportion – of how much he appears, and also no doubt a more straightforward matter of how much one can take of him. The interventionist narrator has thus evolved: in Aaron’s Rod his status was somewhat unstable, but in Lady Chatterley’s Lover he is completely sure of himself, and yet in the latter he is also partly a spatial phenomenon: expressing the author’s sense of extreme distance from his culture. Here he operates under messianic or at least, highly paternalistic principles: he asks that we place complete trust and faith in him. He can offer no other proof of his authority other than his word. Although he reserves the right to complete control, he also stresses his essentially pedagogic agenda: he is showing us what being humanly responsible is really about. His irony is a honed tool of his pedagogy, just as his creator’s use of free indirect style is in service to the general therapeutic purpose. The narrator represents the ‘right’ balance of Being and knowledge-of-being, and thus is also by implication one of the elect few who Lawrence deems fit to be in a position of instruction and cultural enlightenment. But this narrator, like Mellors, is also an impotent and failed leader, who has been unable to successfully fight machines and establish a blood-fellowship of men, a status which reflects that of the author. In the light of Lawrence’s whole novelistic journey and its sequence of causal shifts: from ontological wonder, to the need to defend this in an explicitly political mode, to the abandonment of this hope in the cynical mode, it is the deified narrator who is ultimately symptomatic of the failure – a similar sense of (male) limitation and failure such as is expressed in the imaginary of Joyce’s ‘Ithaca’. The only remaining resource of Lawrence’s narrator is his own knowledge: his weary, purely intellectual apprehension of the truth of the broken society. In this final event, the evolution of the author runs parallel to the evolution of civilisation: the fate of his contributions and efforts coextends with the fate of civilisation, and irony is the mode that gives expression to this. Therefore, this transcendent, deified and impersonal voice, and recourse to ideas was a temporal phenomenon: the last resort for the author (and literally so, considering it was his last full work of fiction before his death in 1930). As this chapter has tried to show, the process of adoption of a conscious voice, either in the novels, or for Lawrence himself, was never a straightforward process. It was moreover, a process of a ‘struggle into consciousness’ in which he used the fiction to put, not only his characters – but implicitly his own writing self – through. As he informs us in Fantasia of the Unconscious, his philosophy, which

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he calls his ‘pollyanalytics’,20 arises out of the novels and poems, and not vice versa. The conscious philosophical voice arises out his creative methods, out of his material ‘alert science’ and allotropic practice. When Lawrence as a writer had come into consciousness, without wanting to excuse some of his most obvious and noxious dogmatic blundering, there is the added sense that the consciously determined voice was equally something that he had ‘grafted’ onto himself, with self-aware deliberation. As I have shown, this conscious voice is really a reflection of the author’s wish to restore society and to realise a new machinic social reality, in the form of a hierarchy. Yet although the failure of this new reality is partly caused by the repugnance of its intrinsic social inequality, in more abstract terms it is a failure of the mechanical state of society in which the ideas appear. Lawrence’s views simply rehearse the mechanical state of representation of this society. In short, I think that the failure of Lawrence’s project is shared with the mechanical society in which it finds itself, a society that absorbs its own critics in order to maintain an abstract standard. For Lawrence’s conscious voice was formed deliberately, and out of a process of struggle, to act deliberately. Yet there is an ultimate irony in that Lawrence’s ontological understanding and correlative desire to oust the supremacy of the intellect caused him, in the final event, to be accused of the most dangerous and abhorrent form of intellectual supremacy – fascism.21

Conclusion In my view, there was ultimately no way in which the advent of the modern, with its ontological deprivation, its temporal economy and formal mechanisation, ceased to be a costly development for Lawrence, both on personal and aesthetic levels. I have enunciated the contours of this devolution within select narratives of the war and post-war period. In The Rainbow we saw ontological Being shift to objective, ‘knowledge-of-being’ in the wake of an industrialised, idea-driven modern society. Whilst The Rainbow monitored this split, Women in Love dissected it, enacting the disparity between the controlling conscious realm of words and ideas and its subjugated unconscious: the powerfully destructive material/forceful dimension. In the latter context, the novel still retained its ontological depth, even whilst it intuited and explicated the apocalyptic end of Being. Although the great cultural shift from the primitive to the modern was negotiated in The Rainbow, the sequel measures the full force of the effects of this shift, not simply to dramatise, but to scientifically investigate what this loss of the human

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and the vital meant. By way of the anatomical reduction of words and ideas to their primary status as forces and materials in Women in Love, it is as if Lawrence wanted to show us in every way he could conceive – because it was the only time he would show us to that extent – exactly what the increasing presence of the verbal idealistic dimension in social life means. This I saw as the point of the modernist break or rupture. Lawrence’s response to modernism’s crisis was to become explicitly political and to adopt two voices: free indirect speech and a dominant narrator. Free indirect speech was his aesthetic concession to a modern world of contrasting viewpoints. But his dominant narrator was a political response to what he saw as the moral chaos of this idealistic and differential world, which he sought to restore to order. This narrator has his most politically charged moment in Aaron’s Rod, the first of the ‘leadership’ novels, in which Lawrence started to lay out his programme for social change. Yet by the time of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, when Lawrence’s hope for wide-scale change had been more or less defeated, the only remaining possibility for narrative lay in its therapeutic and ironic capacity. But the irony in the case of this last novel was doubleedged: it was a narrative tool of criticism and a diagnostic, ‘deified’ stance, and yet also an exposure of the impotence of this purely intellectual narrator, whose failure has been a formal and ontological ‘intuition’ of the whole journey of the fiction, insofar he is caught in a mechanical society and the impasse of representation. Lawrence’s whole oeuvre functions microcosmically therefore: intuiting its own ‘demise’ into the mechanical intellect, in the same way that he saw happening in civilisation. In the final event thus, Lawrence never really embraced modernity. His dalliance with a positively mechanical vision in The Rainbow and Women in Love was a single aesthetic step on a pathway that led towards ideological didacticism. Indeed it seems clear that his attachment to the first stage of modernism, to nature and the human, had never been abandoned by Lawrence in the first place, but had hung around in the background waiting for a new, revised formal vehicle through which it could be implemented in a modern context. But with the same crippling force with which Joyce’s art becomes over-technical, Lawrence’s plan to protect life becomes the very repressive and impotent machine he opposes, because the plan can only exist as an idea. Where Joyce’s textual mode surrenders itself to a state of cynical nonbelief, Lawrence, in contrast, tries to resurrect organic belief in all its force. Both are caught in the paradox of modernity and both come up against ostensibly opposing, yet similarly ineffectual limits. In effect,

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Joyce and Lawrence give us a kind of benchmark of what happens when mechanism and organicism are pushed to their negative extreme; when the human is removed from the picture in Joyce’s case, and, in Lawrence’s, when the creator strives so hard to protect the human and life, that his work has a destructive influence. Lawrence is restricted by the staticity of the organic and Joyce by the sterility of the mechanical; their journey takes both them, and the machine of the book, to points of stagnation. The impasse to which Joyce and Lawrence have brought this critical machine is genuinely insurmountable in a manner of looking at it. On a purely political level, there seems to no way out of the mechanical and archaic state of writing in modern life. But finally it seems pertinent to challenge the negativity of the endings with which both Lawrence and Joyce leave us. Does the modern age really mark the moment at which writing is irrevocably mechanical, and ceasing to hold any positive value for life? Is there not, perhaps, a middle path out of the impasse, a way of entertaining the mechanical element of modern life and its aesthetics, which does not involve falling into either material excess or ideological negativity? I thus finally turn to Woolf to explore this middle path that simultaneously celebrates technicality and life, which strikes a positive balance between functions and forms and between life’s creative energies and its formal shortcomings. We will look to Woolf’s later experiments to find this pure, unencumbered state of the machinic, which will emerge as the subtlest balance between the organic and the mechanical that is achieved by any of the authors, in a literary context.

6 Orlando and The Waves: Machinic Triumph of Form

Both Joyce and Lawrence’s work have brought this critical machine to two different negative limits: a mechanical limit of practice, and an organic limit of ideology. Their legacies suggest that, in the complex aesthetic and political territory of modernism, there is always a risk of falling into these impasses. Yet having established these two limits by way of Joyce and Lawrence, we are starting to be able to trace a dynamic picture of modernism, and of the machinic duration it occupied. Joyce and Lawrence delimit this duration of modernism for us in terms of its dangerous inner and outer boundaries: Joyce marks the inner limit of the mechanical deterritorialising process, and Lawrence the outer limit of the organic reterritorialising process. Both writers have shown the extraordinary lengths to which the modernist text will go to explore the paradoxes of the duration. Joyce and Lawrence have demonstrably engaged a ‘universal’ history: they have involuted a considerable volume of time in their work. But, apart from the central chapter of To the Lighthouse, we have not yet seen so much of this universal time and history in Woolf. Her narrative has largely remained within the temporal present of human consciousness; she has been concentrating on mining this present in relation to form. Where we might say that Joyce and Lawrence are quick to insert all (universal) time into their creations, Woolf approaches universal time in a much more judicial manner. The playful work Orlando is the text in which she expands her narrative dimensions and makes a step into a universal realm, and thus which gives her the launch-point for her supreme cosmic narrative gesture, The Waves. For Deleuze and Guattari, the cosmic realm is that towards which modern art reaches.1 The first chapter on To the Lighthouse investigated Woolf’s comprehensive transformation of narrative, from the static realism of her predecessors, with their dogged adherence to 154

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material and temporal contingency, into a dynamic plane of duration, ‘material’ textual pragmatics, and ontological being (both collective and individual). Indeed To the Lighthouse consists in a kind of literary workshop in which Woolf finds and tests ways to liberate all of these important novelistic components. Finally, the novel upheld aesthetics as a new form of liberated aesthetic autonomy, as a third term between the human and the mechanical, and thus implied Woolf’s ‘acceptance’ of modernity.

Orlando: haeccities and creative facts Orlando is a playful take on the formally and spatiotemporally disruptive spirit of To the Lighthouse. The protagonist Orlando, who lives through over 300 years of English history, qualifies as a kind of metaphysical and intellectual ‘object’: a transpersonal being, through which the author capers with many topical issues – like gender, history and writing – by viewing them through an increasingly cosmic, millennial lens.2 Following on from the aesthetic processes of To the Lighthouse, Orlando the character is another manifestation of the ‘third term’. Neither fact nor fiction, man nor woman: she is in-between. Moreover, this novel-biography also stands as an experimental literary workshop in which Woolf responds to some of the emergent developments in science and philosophy of the early twentieth-century,3 which included the radical new ideas about time, propounded by theorists such as Bergson. Orlando uses elaborate metaphors to playfully speculate and ‘philosophise’ about these developments. Through metaphor she transforms things previously thought intangible, into material event or ‘creative fact’.4 In a particularly famous passage, memory is described as a ‘seamstress’ who ‘runs her needle in and out, up and down’. ‘Capricious’ memory is stirred into consciousness by physical movement and produces a ‘thousand odd, disconnected fragments [ ... ] hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind’ in the mind.5 The use of metaphor in Orlando equates with a certain exteriority (objectivity) of the writing that attempts to substantiate the mind and memory and their processes by imaging them in a highly familiar way. This suggests the deeper ploy to both demystify memory and to oust the mind from its hitherto relatively unchallenged position of unextended abstraction and authority. In a curious way this writing is a kind of appealing publicity for these new ideas, and finds multiple ways not just to make time a substantive fact, but to give it a personality.

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As Orlando speeds through time and history, the metaphors proliferate. In Orlando Woolf practices what can only be described as a kind of hyperbolic historical materialism: she draws a sweeping and vivifying outline of ‘moments’ of cultural change in England over the course of three centuries and fills them with material detail. It is a style which echoes the rampant vortex of ‘Time Passes’ and which transforms her writing style into a kind of dexterous, playful substance, as if ‘priming’ her narrative for ultimate univocity. The larger of these sweeping moments in the text fall roughly into two categories: motifs of kinesis or change, and those of stasis. Both categories conform to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘haeccity’, which can be seen as a compound term denoting molecular dynamism as it pertains to literary activity. Thus in the exposition of the term in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari refer liberally to Woolf and secondarily to D.H. Lawrence and Faulkner, as well as outlining the linguistic exigencies of a ‘becoming’ writing in their wider project of the writer as clinician. Haeccity entails a radical development of phenomenological and intuitive, as opposed to objective perception of the world: a perception from the standpoint of perception, a way of animating the world with perception.6 Haeccity is Deleuze and Guattari’s incitement to writers (in particular) to see phenomena as a complex interaction between physical attributes and spatiotemporal relations that together form ‘dimensions of multiplicities’. These will enable the reader and scholar to monitor becomings, or the tendency for phenomena of every strata of life to enter into composition with one another. Haeccity implies a valuing of the relations between things, more than the things themselves. The concept is a literary version of transcendental empiricism; a mode of ‘perfect’ individuation that allows Deleuze and Guattari to claim that ‘climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them’.7 This mode of individuation is thus temporal – a climate, an hour or a season – and implicates the very act of looking, as I explored from a Bergsonian angle in the first chapter. Haeccity is a self-reflexive perception, a way of ‘seeing’ time in perception. In this context text becomes a percept, a mobilising kinetic force that forms assemblages between quite different phenomena and that injects vital, ontological power into that previously considered inanimate and inhuman. It is through this very playfulness that Orlando makes a serious comment about what civilisation and History as bodies do, and how corporeal, material, semiotic and cultural flows behave within them, as multiplicities and haeccities. As was implied in Lawrence’s allotropic

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vision of history, in Orlando history is not just something we write and authorise, but something which acts for, and which changes, itself. History is a multiplicity, the whole nature of which changes with each localised modification. This is the ‘fertile fact’ of biography that Woolf aspired to as I see it. For Deleuze and Guattari ‘all history is really the history of perception, and what we make history with is the matter of a becoming, not the subject matter of a story’.8 Correspondingly, in Orlando history is a kinetic, becoming force: the text ‘sees’ itself in its historical creation. Orlando fashions, in effect, a historiography of flows: haeccities containing bodies, words, weather, buildings and vegetation through which the advancement of distinct epochs of the British Empire are mediated, hence: As the strokes sounded, the cloud increased, and she saw it darken and spread with extraordinary speed [ ... ] with the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun. (156) In this well-known passage time is evoked through nature and the text takes playful liberty by using the weather as a metaphor of temporal change. This is an arena where everything is given agency. Yet these haeccities are also balanced with some remarkably static moments in Orlando; it is a novel in which a single paragraph can as equally be devoted to 50 years or so of historical and cultural change as it can to a moment of pause in modern London. Hence the following vision, which holds time and a certain moment of cultural life in capture, and portrays modern society in a mythically glorious yet fatalistic context: the traffic was heavy that spring afternoon [ ... ] the wealth and power of England sat, as if sculptured, in hat and cloak, in four-in-hand, victoria and barouche landau. It was as if a golden river had coagulated and massed itself in golden blocks across Park Lane. The ladies held card-cases between their fingers; the gentlemen balanced gold-mounted canes between their knees. She stood there, gazing, admiring, awestruck. One thought only disturbed her, a thought familiar to all who behold great elephants, or whales of an incredible magnitude, and that is how do these leviathans to whom obviously stress, change, and activity are repugnant, propagate their kind? Perhaps, Orlando

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thought, looking at the stately, still faces, their time of propagation is over; this is the fruit; this is the consummation. What she beheld now was the triumph of an age. (200) In its moments of stasis, such as the pause of the traffic, the modern world displays itself as a work of art radiating self-importance and power, as if power is itself a kind of stasis – something at once glorious, finished and dead.9 It is a weary civilisation, overburdened with symbolism and the weight of universal history, but once again, the burden is conveyed in a light-hearted way.10 This passage in particular makes explicit the millennial time that has been the implicit logic of the whole book. Woolf, dissatisfied with homogeneous ‘clock time’, conceives of an alternative: a non-mechanical, vital time, durational, in which growth and change embody a hidden (virtual) process of gestation, whose effects only reveal themselves periodically over the course of centuries, rather than in incremental, traceable units. Thus claims Avrom Fleishman, the ‘suspended animation’ of passages like the above suggest a liminal state between life and death, and ‘serve to crystallize the dominant view of human time in Orlando – gelid and turgid, not merely static but dormant, yet hinting possibilities of millennial growth’.11 In effect, Orlando is really about different speeds of time that are themselves really different speeds of particles in change: the speed of change of bodies and material conditions, and the much slower ‘speed’ of human evolution, about which there is not much yet known. In Orlando we encounter once more the two-fold perception of transcendence and immanence identified in Chapter 1: one level which works off, and perceives, through surface and movement – the outer core of life – and another which is ‘slower’ and more static and eternal. I have previously also described this tension between the mobile and the static as the intrinsic-extrinsic circuit of activity. It is this circuit or margin that I have suggested is the very ‘secret’ of evolutionary change in the relation between humans and their functions. In sum, to the same end as both Lawrence and Joyce, Woolf finally makes her metaphysical narrative fit for conveying the ‘big’ movements of civilisation; she universalises her text. In the case of Orlando these movements perhaps can only be glimpsed and theorised when the outward flux of life is crystallised, in a perspective that allows her to monitor the big and the little all at once. These passages that I have examined in Orlando are like textual waves: there are historical sweeps across the surface of a mutable history, and

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moments of stasis that are cross-sectional calibrations of its depth of time and habit. On an abstract level Orlando stood as a kind of metaphoric exercise which, in a certain manner of looking at it, allowed Woolf to dispense with matter by marshalling and encompassing it in grand strokes. Yet with Orlando, which qualified as Woolf’s first experiment with a relatively arbitrary configuration of time and space in a free, univocal medium, she was not so much sweeping away matter, as rendering more complex the context in which she understood it. Hence the use of metaphor, which serves as a kind of substitute for a spatiotemporal framework by embodying a self-supporting ‘materiality’ of narrative: a univocity. In this context, the haeccity of metaphor is again the site of the dynamic relations of the third term in narrative: in which the duality of inner/outer, material/immaterial and male/female, for example, no longer have currency. As I have frequently suggested, the notion of the text as ‘material intuition’ (and something to which a contemporary concept such as haeccity can be applied), by no means represents a retrospective application of postmodernist discourse onto a modernist text, but was a markedly modernist practice. Holly Henry, who records Woolf’s vigorous interest in the scientific, mathematical, astronomical and cosmological advances of her day, documents that Woolf’s broad intellectual circle led her into direct contact with mathematicians such as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, who were both theorising the possibility for a self-reflexive scientific knowledge of matter. In Whitehead’s case this specifically focused on the event of perception within a ‘multiplex of relations’ between the object and the observer, and in Russell’s, on the understanding of material objects as ‘the interchange between an observer, either human or instrument such as the camera’. In this way, the new theories of perception of both of these thinkers included the percipient in their own processes and stressed the necessity for multiple, over singular, perspective(s), in order to afford a more ‘accurate articulation of material phenomena or the non-human’.12 Deleuze’s concept of haeccity, like many others we have explored, is the effect of such theories. Through presenting life and history as waves of material detail, Woolf is clearly articulating these theories as a literary proposition that will render narrative the site of fusion of science and art. The Waves represents the culmination of this project, insofar as narrative becomes a blend of the sensible and the biological. Whilst matter, time and space are managed in a sweeping and relatively arbitrary fashion in Orlando, as I will show, in The Waves they are managed by rhythm.

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Deleuze and Guattari’s cosmic aesthetic Deleuze and Guattari’s artistically and musically oriented plateau ‘Of the Refrain’ provides a fitting context in which to assimilate the ‘cosmological’ bearings of The Waves, and the machinic magnanimity of its literary vision. Here, the philosophers designate three ages of art: the classical, romantic and the modern which are ‘assemblages enveloping different Machines, or different relations to the Machine’. The modern age is the age of the cosmic; the era where painting, as visual material, ‘must now capture nonvisible forces’, where philosophy must capture the unthinkable and where we enter the age of the machine: ‘the immense mechanosphere, the plane of cosmicization of forces to be harnessed’. For Deleuze and Guattari, when ‘forces become necessarily cosmic, material becomes necessarily molecular, with enormous force operating in an infinitesimal space’.13 The awareness of infinitesimal space was a shaping factor for writers and artists in the early twentiethcentury and in this Woolf was no exception: she was a keen spectator of the astronomical and geological discoveries that were sweeping through all levels of culture. Such developments, claims Holly Henry, included a ‘re-calculation of the scope and age of the universe’ which ‘demonstrated that the earth was ‘at least two billion years old’.14 In the event of this machinic age of art, the modern figure of creativity is not restricted to the artist, claim Deleuze and Guattari, but functions as a ‘cosmic artisan’, who turns his or her attention to the microscopic, to crystals, molecules, atoms, and particles, not for scientific conformity, but [ ... ] for nothing but immanent movement; the artist tells him – or herself that this world has had different aspects, will have still others, and that there are already others on other planets.15 The Waves adheres to all of the above: the narrative functions through an immanent kinesis (its rhythm), and by way of the interludes, contains the implication that there is much that is out of reach of human intelligence and perception. For Deleuze and Guattari, the principal action of a modern work of art is the consolidation of the deterritorialised and disparate forces in order to elaborate ‘an increasingly rich and consistent material’. The key to this elaboration is prodigious simplicity: the more one employs a ‘maximum of calculated sobriety in relation to the disparate elements and the parameters’, the richer the effects of the machine. Likewise, in music, what is needed to make sound travel is a

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very simple, pure sound, a ‘rarefied’ atmosphere.16 The water and wave analogy of Woolf’s work embodies this act of simplicity/complexity.17 The narrative rhythm, which has a somewhat homogeneous texture, engenders the liquid reciprocity between dualities. The hypostasising quality of Woolf’s narrative, observed in Chapter 1, reaches its peak in The Waves. Here, narrative is a pure surface on which reality is dynamically produced and consumed through multiple orders of time. As Jean Guiguet claims, the ‘power of absorption and transmutation is what we find in its purest state in The Waves’.18 This is a narrative plane of consistency, a machinic machine that is ‘purer’ and more all-encompassing than Woolf’s previous metaphysical novels, towards which they have been gesturing. It is a work in which there is an ultimate tension between the organic and the mechanical, between the finite and the infinite, and life and death, to the extent that it becomes impossible to any longer see the terms of these dual as mutually exclusive. More than any other of the works selected, the risk of reading The Waves with Deleuze and Guattari, a reading in which poetry meets science, is a tendency towards scholarly heavy-handedness and over-technicality – of bulldozing what is the wealth of poetic suggestion and intuition in the novel, with the clinical machinations of postmodernist concepts. I will therefore try to proceed as lightly as possible. But I also believe that the biophysical suggestion of a highly technical work such as The Waves calls for a reading with these postmodernist metaphysical concepts, calls for a style of reading that could not be conducted with the concepts of classical literary theory. Moreover, any marriage of a literary work with Deleuze and Guattari must acknowledge a certain license and expressiveness of its own. Thus I intend in no way for this argument – which makes detailed correlations between the concepts with the prose-poem – to be logically foolproof or exhaustive, but offer it, like my other readings in this book, as an experiment.

The Waves: the pure machinic of form The Waves (1931) is Woolf’s formal masterpiece, the work to which her whole metaphysical project has been leading. Orlando, claims Guiguet, might only have been ‘an arabesque in the margin of the research that led up to The Waves’.19 As I have shown, Orlando gives the ‘reverse’ side of the metaphysical coin, so to speak, of the conceptions that underlie The Waves: what was cosmic, millennial and micrological fancy in Orlando became a deeply serious matter in the later work. The Waves represents the fruit of the spatiotemporal exploration of the previous

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novels. The novel has passed through the framework of space and time onto a more intrinsic level of their synthesis (which includes the dynamic synthesis of all previous dualities). Hence the work presents a fluid topology of paradoxes in which everything rhythmically folds into itself, and only exists in kinetic reference to something else. Both Orlando and The Waves are determined by what Alice Van Buren Kelly sees as the ‘hyperbolic embodiment of the fact that time is all one’, and while in the case of the former this involved extraordinary expansions of time and matter, in the latter it is the patterns and stages of mortal life and a single day in nature which determine the form and rhythmic tempo of the work, the economy of which is determined by the pure relation between things.20 The Waves is loosely organised into a series of three stages, which overlap and feed into one another: the cosmos and the building of a territory, the body of life/the inhabitation of a territory, and the rhythmical/summative flow of art. In this way, the work is itself a narrative ‘organism’ which pulses with cosmic, territorial and artistic life such as Deleuze and Guattari discuss in their plateau ‘Of the Refrain’. I will trace the outline or the whole ‘body’ of this narrative organism that The Waves attempts to encompass as it is set in aesthetic tension with the partly inorganic element of the narrative plane of consistency out of which it is constructed. In the early childhood sections the cosmic bearings of the work seem palpably clear. Hence the following crystallike matrix of interconnecting assemblages of the child Bernard’s consciousness are similar to those invoked by Deleuze and Guattari. Lying in bed Bernard is ‘afloat in the shallow light which is like a film of water drawn over my eyes by a wave. I hear through it far off, far away, faint and far, the chorus beginning; wheels; dogs; men shouting; church bells; the chorus beginning’ (19–20). The child’s hearing is like a net catching the sonic assemblages and inter-assemblages composing life and connecting him to the wider world. These early sections have a heightened luminosity, due to the two-fold purity: of both the poetic form, and of the quality of the child’s perception itself, which is unobstructed and untainted by habit, and whose senses penetrate, as we see above, in both a localised and a far-reaching way. The child’s psyche is a membrane of becoming, which fuses its emotional life with the material world. Susan, in her moment of anguish trips and flings herself down on the roots under the trees, where the light seems to pant in and out, in and out. The branches heave up

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and down. There is agitation and trouble here. There is gloom. [ ... ] The roots make a skeleton on the ground, with dead leaves heaped in the angles. Susan has spread her anguish out. (9–10) Her suffering is inseparable from the environment: both for Susan herself who resolves to flee to the wood and ‘sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there’, and in Bernard’s perception of it; he sees the branches which ‘heave up and down.’ It is as if the emotion happens around Susan, encloses her. The objective being of children is total – they are authentically machinic beings. They experience no separation of themselves from the world and therefore emotions seem to come from ‘outside’ themselves. So claim Deleuze and Guattari, life goes ‘not from a center to an exteriority but from an exterior to an interior’.21 Young children self-territorialise in the same way: they negotiate what is unknown in their exterior, by introjecting, by transforming it into a ‘secret territory’ whose ‘decomposing leaves’ and ‘rotting vegetation’ becomes a ‘malarial jungle’ with exotic creatures (16). Life is a pulsing refrain and children are in univocal affinity with the world. Where in To the Lighthouse Woolf was experimenting with the capacity for the text to emit sound, in The Waves Woolf’s narrative is now fully attuned to the task: every resource of language is employed towards the production of a vast implicated, ‘absolute’ noise of life. Just as in a musical piece there is a sense of construction towards the beginning: a cumulative process of gathering and establishing the notes, motifs, harmonies and tempo – so in The Waves, in the earlier childhood sections all is a gathering and a marking out of a territory – on the part of characters, the birds and the author. The author as ‘artisan’, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, creates a territory of life and marks its stages in the manner of a ritual in The Waves. In this way the birds feature strongly in these early constructive sections. In the fourth interlude they ‘sang as if the song were urged out of them by the pressure of the morning. They sang as if the edge of being were sharpened and must cut, must split the softness of the blue-green light, the dampness of the wet earth’ (89). Birds use music to ‘cut’ and carve out their territory, as humans use their consciousness to establish a mode of being in the world. Each monologue in this way functions like a territorial expression, a song. Numerous bird/human parallels in the body text and the interludes – especially in the young life of the six characters – suggest this territorial marking and construction process (101, 207). There is a striking sense of the birth of consciousness in these opening sections: the narrative travels through the simple statements of the six, as if constructing their

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initial world. The actions, reactions, depths, contours and movements of these narrative percepts become increasingly more complex and involved as narrative and each child’s consciousness are born. The narrative travels through different layers or ‘milieux’ that encompass both states of perception and locations perceived, and which therefore do not recognise any distinction between inner and outer life, but incrementally build and elaborate the perceptual and the real world in synchrony. The first layer is the subjective response to the visual world of ‘I’ in response to nature: ‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard’; ‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan.’ The next is the children’s objective response to the visual in nature: ‘the leaves are gathered’, ‘a shadow falls’, and ‘a caterpillar is curled’ (5), which then moves into a primary sensual experience of nature: ‘the back of my hand burns’, ‘birds are singing up and down and in and out all round us’, and subsequently into visual objectivity in the domestic environment: ‘now Mrs Constable pulls up her thick black stockings’ (6). There is a contrary double-movement in this: on the level of form it is the narrative which unfurls a primary territory, the novel’s foundation, but inversely, on the level of content, and contained in the narrative awareness, it is the semiotic world which is an instrument of intervention, division and deconstruction of the idyllic, visceral and pre-verbal consciousness of the children. As in Joyce, we find the fundamental and simultaneous forces of reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation at work in the presentation of this machine of life. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the primary materials of the cosmic artisan (be they bird, artist or writer) as ‘matters of expression’. They write: ‘As matters of expression take on consistency they constitute semiotic systems, but the semiotic components are inseparable from material components and are in exceptionally close contact with molecular levels.’22 Like all her works which have been moving towards a textual ‘material intuition’, The Waves points to a morphological consciousness of words such as is suggested above by Deleuze and Guattari, in which words both represent and enact their meaning, and in which their sense is directly accountable to their materiality. Woolf lays the ground for this understanding in the youthful stages of life by setting up multiple coextensive and reciprocal relations between semiotic, material and creature phenomena, as if they all come from the same primary ‘stuff’, and all is a building-block process of nature’s codes and materials. These semantic and material reversibilities are in keeping with the fluid logic of the whole work. For Bernard, as for Woolf, it is words and phrases

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which are primary: they make an ‘unsubstantial territory’ (11), ‘smoke rings’ (53), and elsewhere are compared to fish (214), horses and waves (66), birds (14) and stones (14). The children soon come up against the abstract world of signs and words – the invisible, machinic architecture of the world: ‘Those are white words,’ said Susan, ‘like stones one picks up by the seashore.’ ‘They flick their tails right and left as I speak them,’ said Bernard. ‘They wag their tails; they flick their tails; they move through the air in flocks, now this way, now that way, moving all together, now dividing, now coming together.’ ‘Those are yellow words, those are fiery words,’ said Jinny. ‘I should like a fiery dress, a yellow dress, a fulvous dress to wear in the evening.’ ‘Each tense,’ said Neville, ‘means differently. There is an order in this world; there are distinctions, there are differences in this world, upon whose verge I step. For this is only a beginning.’ (14–15) It is significant that the children’s first encounter with the world of words is figurative and sensual, suggesting that the path of intellectual knowledge has a strongly non-intellectual dimension. Words take hold in the children imaginatively, in a different way in each according to typology. Yet the children are soon aware of the separate world signs and words make: Susan defines herself against Bernard: ‘I am tied down with single words. But you wander off; you slip away; you rise up higher, with words and words in phrases’ (11). This capacity for words and signs to give birth to a separate world is a threat for Susan and more strongly for Rhoda, the character most recognisable as a spatial being. For the latter time is a shape, a ‘loop’ (15), that one must enter to participate in life. Rhoda, characteristically, is unable to do this, she ‘cannot make one moment merge in the next’ (106). Thus the six move into their first emotional experiences and thence their first egoistic reflections on roles that will develop throughout life. It is the child who is a primary conduit for these cosmic ‘materials’ – indeed the child is already a little cosmos in themselves. For children, memory ‘falls’ at the end of the day: Water pours down the runnel of my spine. Bright arrows of sensation shoot on either side. I am covered with warm flesh. My dry crannies are wetted; my cold body is warmed; it is sluiced and gleaming. Water

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descends and sheets me like an eel. Now hot towels envelop me, and their roughness, as I rub my back, makes my blood purr. Rich and heavy sensations form on the roof of my mind; down showers the day – the woods; and Elevedon; Susan and the pigeon. Pouring down the walls of my mind, running together, the day falls copious, resplendent. (19) In the immediacy of the child’s consciousness, a single day is a whole cycle or wave – a total unit of time. The above suggests the way in which, in the growing person, the mnemonic faculty is as if physically, incrementally formed with each day: arising from a soldering of daily reflections with the sensory and physical experiences of evening – it evolves out of routine. The human being is an organism that consolidates itself in daily memory and through memory creates a self-territory. It is no accident that memory is stimulated in the above case through water and the body: both are sites of positive duality and reciprocity, part of the fluid logic guiding the work. In this child’s realm it is not possible to separate time and perception: each is cultivated by way of memory and habit, and have their foundation in sensation. In effect, time is repetitive sensation. In the narrative as vital organism, there is now movement out of the cosmic and into the ‘loop of time’ (15) and bodily regularity. Deleuze calls this latter time meter or ‘pulsed time’. It is always a ‘territorialized time’, in that each pulse is an action of territorial marking; it scans, marks or measures a territory, and it is the time of development of forms and of education. It is ‘biological time’. Neither Woolf nor Deleuze are completely opposed to pulsed time, it is accepted as part of life, as the latter claims: pulsed time will always be given to you, or it will be imposed on you, you will be forced to comply with it [ ... ] And here, it’s not an individual or collective problem, once again there is something common to the problem of the individual and that of the collective: the individual is a collective as much as a collective is individuated.23 Pulsed time is a condition of being alive and being an organism. As is indicated with Bernard above, in childhood pulsed time is one of the ways through which the child builds a territory, which in the first case is always the sensible territory of corporeality. Hence a sense of time (and pulsed time) are as much imprinted from the outside, as they are a function of the body, so Louis reflects that as children their ‘lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on

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the nape of the neck in gardens’ (30). Equally, external sensory stimuli impose meter or homogeneous time on the child, and the evolution of the human organism is, as a result, largely parallel: it is not possible to differentiate between the individual and the collective, as Deleuze argues above. Time and the body are both organisms and mechanisms: time is the body. The organism is also a mechanism in its (extrinsic) process of growth and extension. The book The Waves, as a vital narrative ‘organism’, is caught up in the process of evolutionary parallelism or a generalised movement of becoming, in which individuals, the collective, nature and the work of art become in synchronicity, (and less obviously in ‘aparallel’, non-vital becoming). Thus we find a sense of the genesis of pulsed time in an early interlude in flower imagery: ‘As the light increased a bud here and there split asunder and shook out flowers, green veined and quivering, as if the effort of opening had set them rocking, and pealing a faint carillon as they beat their frail clappers against their white walls’ (21). Time literally comes into being through the power of organic life: ‘as if the effort of opening had set them rocking’. There is a strong connection between the above and Bernard’s young perception of pulsed time in the monologue it introduces: Everybody seems to be doing things for this moment only; and never again. Never again. The urgency of it all is fearful. Everybody knows I am going to school, going to school for the first time. ‘That boy is going to school for the first time’, says the housemaid. (22) His sudden realisation – like the bursting forth and quivering of the new flower – is one of the first in a long line of philosophical realisations that will ensue in his life. This realisation is both wise in its completeness – like a formed flower – and yet childish in the effort of its (the flowers and Bernard’s) own birth. Hence ‘as if the effort of opening had set them rocking [ ... ] as they beat their frail clappers against their white walls’ correlates with the childish clamour, which I have emphasised with underlining (see above). Pulsed time is starting to have sway: Bernard is being formed here and the parameters of his self-territory expanded. Repetition emphasises and enacts this process.

The body of life By the time young adulthood is attained in The Waves, life reverberates vigorously with pulsed time, and the metaphysical dynamic of the text

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has, correspondingly, become more dense, complex and ‘corporealised’. In this sense the narrative is just as much of a corporeal organism as the life it denotes. Hence Woolf’s thoughts surrounding it: Suppose I could run all the scenes together more? – by rhythms chiefly. So as to avoid those cuts; so as to make the blood run like a torrent from end to end – I don’t want the waste that the breaks give [ ... ] a saturated unchopped completeness; changes of scene, of mind, of person, done without spilling a drop. Now if it could be worked over with heat and currency [ ... ] I am getting my blood up.24 This suggests the scientific and even biological imperative the work had for Woolf and reveals a much more primal author than that to whom we are used, who was pouring the raw energies of her own body into her creative process. Her sense of the ‘saturated unchopped completeness’ of both her materials and subject matter translates into what we have been constructing as univocity. It is this gesture of balancing the materials with the forces of life in The Waves, that is, as I will presently propose, the most integral literary rendering of univocity out of all the novels studied so far. Woolf’s effort comes the closest out of any of the novels to Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines. This originary forgery of elements in The Waves started in childhood, as the parallelism of the body with the world. We have encountered this parallelism and reciprocity between the individual and the collective before in Lawrence in The Rainbow, both in the context of the body and the will, in his picture of an initially vital and subsequently mechanically self-producing collective. Yet where Lawrence was inclined to historicise and separate the two modes of evolution by placing the vital organic production as a primitive, and the mechanical as a modern state of affairs, Woolf shows no such discrimination. Indeed where Lawrence and Joyce were inclined, as I have argued, to rapidly ‘universalise’ their texts by injecting them with a large quantity of time, Woolf melds the mechanics of literary form and the time of the body, of growth and life in a more integral way, and arrives at a ‘cosmic’ dimension only by way of this comprehensive integration. The dialogue between aesthetics and politics that is being negotiated by all these writers’ modernist journeys in various ways and at various tempos happens in Woolf principally through formal development, as opposed to being motivated by ideological or ideologically subversive reasons, as in Lawrence and Joyce. Hence on every level The Waves exudes the triumphant climax of reconciliation,

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both formal and thematic, of all oppositions: organic and mechanical, aesthetic and political, and natural and civilised. As The Waves travels through the character’s lives, the parallel organic/mechanical growth of the individual body with the collective corpus of the civilised, formed world solidifies: the metrical, pulsed time of the body is transposed directly into the established order of civilisation, into the formed organic world dominated by the individual ‘I’ and into the collective awareness, as Bernard sees it, that they ‘exist not only separately but in undifferentiated blobs of matter’ (205). This is the first thematised flow I identify in The Waves: it is the flow of bodily and perceptual habit that eventually becomes unconscious through familiarity, as Rhoda observes, of being ‘embedded in a substance made of repeated moments run together’ (185) in which they ‘attain the utmost freedom from friction’ (180). It is a flow of matter or repetition, a naturalised force, reinforced by allusions in the interludes, which draw parallels between forces of the sea and those of civilisation: the waves ‘beat like a drum that raises a regiment of plumed and turbaned soldiers’ (89) and fall ‘with the concussion of horses’ hooves on the turf’ (88). They have ‘the energy, the muscularity, of an engine’ (88) just as the hills ‘seem bound back by thongs, as a limb is laced by muscles; and the woods which bristled proudly on their flanks were like the curt, clipped mane on the neck of a horse’ (88). As in much of her work Woolf gives voice to this side of life, but she is ironically aware of its limitations and its maleness. But life is a spatial arrangement, as much as it is a progressive flow and the second thematised ‘flow’ in The Waves suggests the molecularised antithesis of the above. It is the disordered, spatial, immaterial, inorganic, dimension behind and between the matter flow: the domain of non-self, the ‘sunless territory of non-identity’ (95). It is Neville’s recognition that there are no ‘repetitions [ ... ] each day is dangerous. Smooth on the surface, we are all bone beneath like snakes coiling’ (177). Louis is hounded by it in his recurring vision of a chained beast which ‘stamps and stamps on the shore’ (53). For Susan, who is completely absorbed in the natural continuum of motherhood and rural life, the two flows – which in her case pertain simply to life and death – are already perfectly intertwined: ‘I pad about the house all day long in apron and slippers, like my mother who died of cancer’ (142). This second flow is Bernard’s acknowledgement that: for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of

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time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting. (220) This flow inheres in deterritorialised movements that escape pulsed time, as it manifests in the work of art, it is ‘non-pulsed’ time or what Deleuze and Guattari more definitively term the ‘Body without Organs’. Where pulsed time refers to the plane of transcendence, non-pulsed time refers to the plane of immanence. According to Deleuze, non-pulsed time, by definition, can only be ‘wrested’ from a pulsed time, which usually occurs by way of music and art. Non-pulsed time remains virtual unless it is fabricated, which is what composers, musicians and all artists do, through rhythm. It is a ‘time made of heterogeneous durations, whose relations rest on a molecular population’, rather than on a ‘unifying metrical form’. 25 This is the molecular vision of the plane of consistency which is hinted at throughout The Waves, and which comes to the fore in the old age and artistic effort of Bernard. During adult life, it is Rhoda who traverses this body without organs in the most radical way and who floats in the schizoid space of her own bleak, inhuman and yet beautiful inner world, in which ‘the swallow dips her wings in dark pools’ (85) and ‘wild dogs bark far away’ (15). Yet she is unable to sustain participation in the life-flow and thus finally takes her own life. Rhoda’s visionary perception also focuses the interaction between the two different flows of time, hence her perception of life and the present moment as aggressors: With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. It is to this we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses. And yet we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures. (50–51) For Rhoda, who already lives in the gaps, the imbalance between the two flows is clear. Her character feeds into a wider critique of pulsed time and the organic – or in Deleuze-Guattarian terminology ‘molar’ – formations, which attend pulsed time and which permeate the work as a whole. Pulsed time and its product – the formed, molar world – are intrinsically conservative and hermetic: they progress, but do not allow any communication between milieux. Pulsed time leaves

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something fragile and marginal of life out, hence Bernard’s perception of groups of men: On they roll; on they gallop; after hounds, after footballs; they pump up and down attached to oars like sacks of flour. All divisions are merged – they act like one man [ ... ] now again they are smashing the china – that is the convention. An old, unsteady woman carrying a bag trots home under the fire-red windows. She is half afraid that they will fall on her and tumble her into the gutter. (73) It is a picture of life that seems to concord with Deleuze and Guattari’s own idea that the sheer power of organic formations leads to cruelty and to marginalising oppression. In The Waves when tragedy strikes it is clear that our molar structures are not sufficient, there is no means of linkage (and therefore implicitly no means of healing) in experience. Thus upon the death of Percival Bernard reflects: ‘We have no ceremonies, only private dirges and no conclusions, only violent sensations, each separate’ (129). Both forms of time are as criticised as they are celebrated. Pulsed time, as contained in the body and anything vitally organic, is required to sustain life, but can translate into repetitive repression. Non-pulsed time, as contained in chaos, spontaneity, and vision, for example, is the very stuff of life and art, but can lead toward madness and death. Indeed there are complex crossovers between pulsed and non-pulsed time, between Being and non-being, life and death, and between all thematic dualities in the text, that render Woolf’s vision intrinsically Deleuzian, and that render a brief departure from our tracing of the flow of life in The Waves into the theory necessary. The sheer complexity of the dynamically dualistic fabric of the text requires that we conceive of dualism from another conceptual angle; in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘statistical’ order and model of difference. The ‘doublearticulation’ molar/molecular, argue Deleuze and Guattari, is the only distinction as such, which exists to be made over normative binaries. The molar/molecular theory is an active duality: a conception of the relatively fixed forms and flows of ‘unformed’ particles of life and the becoming (forming and unforming) processes between them (also correlative to the two great directions of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation encountered in Ulysses). The molar/molecular distinction offers a definitive answer to the organic-mechanical or vitality/non-vitality dialectic that has been axiomatic to the journey of

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this book. When taken as distinct wholes, both machines and living things, argue Deleuze and Guattari, are ‘mass phenomena or molar aggregates’ and consequently each points ‘to the extrinsic existence of the other’; they oppose one another. But crucial for Deleuze and Guattari is that this differentiation is statistical; it is a question of numbers, as opposed to inherent qualities. Quantitatively differentiated, machines and animate things are merely ‘two paths in the same statistical direction’. On the other side of the coin, which is the ‘more profound or intrinsic direction of multiplicities’, there is no qualitative difference between the animate and the inanimate, but instead complete ‘interpenetration, direct communication between the molecular phenomena and the singularities of the living’. Hence there is a domain of ‘nondifference’ in which there are ‘as many living beings in the machine as there are machines in the living’.26 The molar-molecular doublearticulation is the margin of energetic activity with evolutionary implications that I have speaking about throughout the book. The Waves qualifies as an event of extraordinary textual omnipercipience of these two statistical directions or levels, molar and molecular, and indeed of the sub-processes and movements that link them. The prose-poem inheres in a kind of stratified reverberation between the extrinsic world: between organic or ‘gross’ fictional concerns like the psychological states of the characters and personal and historical events, and the increasingly abstract philosophical dualities that underlie this world. It is these philosophical dualities, such as life and death, and solitariness and community, for example, which are expressed as molar themes of the text, and yet which create the text’s dynamic movements and oscillations. The parallel paradoxes of life and death and solitude and community intensify in the central, growing adult sections. As both textual and life-flow in The Waves swell with the deepening experience and maturation processes of the six, (with their ‘statistically’ increasing experience), the textual fabric becomes more paradoxical and more crowded with statistical combinations of these opposites of life. These quantitative relationships between opposites are modulated through the life-rhythms of the six characters. For example, Jinny follows the molar flow of pulsed time or vital organic matter socially and sexually for most of her life, and yet must confront the death of non-pulsed time later on when she is losing her sexual magnetism. Her recognition of this in the Tube one day provides a sinister vision: ‘I am no longer young. I am no longer part of the procession. Millions descend those stairs in a terrible descent. Great wheels churn inexorably urging them downwards. Millions have

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died. Percival died. I still move. I still live. But who will come if I signal’ (160)? There is not only individual and collective, but artistic parallelism here: Jinny’s intimation of death in ageing ‘draws’ both wider forces of mechanism of urban existence, but also the ultimate event of civilisation’s death – First World War – into narrative consciousness. In this way, the machine of society (and the work of art), of which Jinny is a microcosm, can be seen as intimating or statistically invoking multiple and different states of living and dying: there is the becoming-old ‘death’ of Jinny (a death in life), the sensed death of war, and the unpleasant mechanical life of the urban – the Tube – which is also a kind of deathly psychic experience. Jinny, who for most of her life aligns herself with the molar, corporeal life-mode of the social machine, must inevitably swing towards solitude and the reality of being atomically insignificant (molecular), by way of her physical ageing process; she must confront her growing isolation from the sexual/social ‘procession’ – the body of society. But it is through her molecularity and (first) taste of social insignificance that an important modernist dimension emerges in the work, a tragic visionary moment of the First World War. Conversely, Rhoda, who lives for the main part in the solitude and non-vitality of non-pulsed time – and thus who stands as the antithesis of Jinny – has a surge of epiphanic connection to culture and molar life following the death of Percival. Watching a play she sees ‘the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing’, that ‘we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation’ (134). It is the death of one of the collective that brings her life to momentary organic form. The implication of both Jinny’s and Rhoda’s experiences is that life and death interpenetrate with rhythmical profundity and the rhythm of interpenetration is quantitative: a life that is lived ‘too’ vitally (sexually, youth and socially driven) must inevitably confront a death of that previous life, and equally, a life that is lived non-vitally (solitarily, unhappily) can undergo or produce intensely vital, epiphanic periods. Although strongly accented with death, the tortured Rhoda is in many ways just as vitally conscious and creative by so strongly living death, as a character like Jinny who follows the dominant, ostensibly vital, yet predictably mechanical flow of the body or pulsed time. Life and death are part of a univocal fabric of life, a fabric that renders them proportional to one another, as opposed to qualitatively different. Deleuze and Guattari share this proportional conception of life and death. They argue that death is an experience in life, part of the

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desiring-machine; death occurs ‘in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in every intensity as passage or becoming. It is in the very nature of every intensity to invest within itself the zero intensity starting from which it is produced’, just as all life operates through a dynamic binary, and the organic must turn mechanical.27 Like machines and living things, interpenetrating life and death are side by side as two ‘states’ of the unconscious: death is a desiring molecular flow in life. Death in life is also the stuff of art, even if it is a perversely mechanical life-flow, as Lawrence explored in Women in Love. Hence it is socially awkward characters Rhoda and Louis, who Bernard notes, are the ‘authentics’, and Rhoda who is accorded some of the most poetic reflections: ‘I have sliced the waters of beauty in the evening when the hills close themselves like birds’ wings folded’ (171). Indeed in The Waves life and death are balanced on the finest edge and Woolf is particularly sensitive to the paradox: to the violence and the beauty of life/death. Hence Bernard’s reflection of train travel as he approaches London that: ‘we are about to explode in the flanks of the city like a shell in the side of some ponderous, maternal, majestic animal. She hums and murmurs; she awaits us’. In the train he is ‘become part of this speed, this missile hurled at the city’ (91). The provocative interfusion of war connotations with city images in the depictive context of the ongoing flow of human life insinuates the increasing (a) political complexity of this machinic textual fabric. War, that most destructive of human events, is still part of the flow. On this radical level of interpenetration between organs and machines, and life and death, human morality thus becomes a complicated proposition. The delicate and yet comprehensive science of Woolf’s rhythm, which visits all implicative combinations of life, cannot escape a hint of the same cynical politics that I attributed to Joyce. The Waves contains something like the ‘code’ for modern cynicism that was intimated in Ulysses and that is present in Deleuze and Guattari’s contentious idea that, on one level, life (desire) desires its own repression. Thus far I have investigated the way in which The Waves builds its dense fabric of life and how it is the different characters themselves that – at different times and in different combinations – refract two ‘states’ of dualities, such as life and death, and solitude and community. In The Waves important philosophical polarities and events, which are on the molar level of formation or existence, are entirely subject to these dynamic rhythmical processes that alternate them and implicitly fold them into a single harmonious process or substance. Indeed Woolf admitted that with The Waves she was ‘writing to a rhythm and not to

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a plot’.28 Rhythm is the dynamic bridge between the molar and the molecular, the extrinsic and the intrinsic. In order to move further into the univocity of The Waves, and to observe the simultaneously intrinsic and extrinsic actions of rhythm, we need to objectify this rhythm to a greater degree. We need to separate rhythm into its component parts as they occur in and shape the whole text, and these parts are best understood in terms of space, time and art.

The rhythm of space The rhythm of space in The Waves consists of two main sets or extrinsic ‘aggregates’, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, of difference. The first of these differential aggregates is the group of six characters that composes the main body of the text. The second aggregate of difference is the alternative textual ‘mode’ of the natural interludes, which are juxtaposed to the main text. A way of thinking these different textual modes of The Waves in intensive Deleuze-Guattarian terms is in relation to the philosophers’ concept of ‘intervals’, which are a type of activity on the plane of consistency. Intervals implement a ‘distribution of inequalities, such that it is sometimes necessary to make a hole in order to consolidate’.29 Likewise there is an ‘interval’ rhythm of character in The Waves, that is quantitative in the sense of each monologue physically breaking another (in the machine of the text), and qualitative in the sense that each character is innately different in nature. Further, the natural intervals break with both the normative human and the normative temporal flow of the text; whilst the main text condenses the human life-span, in the interludes a single day only passes. It is because of this interval rhythm of characters and the interludes in The Waves – a rhythm that is both quantitative and qualitative – that difference literally is the form of the work. As Elicia Clements notes, ‘the six subjectivities become the structure; “character” and form are indivisible’.30 As I have previously observed, Woolf was inspired by and artistically responding to new mathematical principles of multiplicity that were circulating in her intellectual circles at the time, and The Waves, to my mind, represents the zenith of her appropriation of these theories into her own project, insofar as the text is premised on difference. In The Waves the text has become a percept of difference: difference is its mode of perception, the filter through which it sees life. Difference is put into play in a thoroughly Deleuzian manner in The Waves: not so as to denote separation, but to create synthesis. As I have noted previously, Deleuze contests the premise of Western philosophical rationalism that

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holds difference as derived from identity and essence, and argues that difference is ontologically primary; everything is derived from it. Difference is ‘always a cause, the formal cause’, it is ‘behind everything’ but there is nothing behind it. Difference cannot be thought, but only sensed. It is a generative force: ‘synthetic’, ‘mediated’, ‘productive’, ‘it is itself mediation’, the ‘middle term in person’.31 Difference is life, it is movement, and it is Being that differs from itself. Difference is the differentiating process and substance of Being; it is univocal. Likewise, The Waves forms a differentiating substance and process, a univocity, simultaneously substantial and mobile. The difference (of the six characters) is used to synthesise a unity that is not fixed, but dynamic and ‘living’, and thus which implies community. That life is fundamentally communal, as opposed to being singular or individual, is the motivating concept of The Waves, as has been observed from the outset of critical response to the work. Hence Bernard reflects that at Hampton Court they ‘saw for a moment laid out among us the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to be, but at the same time, cannot forget’ (231). In this way the six characters slide into one another: continually thinking of and quoting one another, affecting one another in absence and defining themselves through each other. Bernard knows himself through being unlike those who ‘find their satisfaction in one person, or in infinity’ (implicitly Neville, Louis or Rhoda), because his ‘being only glitters when all its facets are exposed to many people’ (154). It is through such subtle and profound knowledge of and feeling for one another that they are created as one body. This is a friendship, in which, as Jinny reflects, ‘our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love’ (113). Friendship is a cosmic substantive: no less than a kind of key to a fuller participation in the alchemy of the universe. There must be strong qualitative differentiation of the six for the dynamism of this metaphysic (the living quality) of the work to occur, and it is here that the poetic language of The Waves – as the optimally plastic material for qualitative evocation – is indispensable. Thus when characters speak, there is rarely a confusion as to who is speaking, as Josephine O’ Brien Schaefer points out: the ‘emotional auras that surround Jinny and Susan [for example] in their affirmations of life are distinctly their own’.32 It is not so much that the character speaks, so much as qualities channel themselves through the character, so attuned is the language, for example Louis: ‘So imperfect are my senses that they never blot out with one purple the serious charge that my reason adds and adds against us, even as we sit here’ (182) perfectly evokes his calculating, passionately oppressed, self-critical reductiveness, whilst

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Neville’s intellectual narcissism and insinuating, possessive sensuality are felt strongly in: ‘That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions’ (70–71). Each character has a developed signature in this way.33 The language is designed to harness the raw sensible and energetic qualities of this signature. Consequently, Woolf is not so much painting characters as ritualistically ‘practicing’ them. Woolf plays, as O’ Brien Schaefer notes, ‘a kind of human geometry game’. But Woolf also practices difference through the second component of the rhythm of space in The Waves, the natural and non-human interludes. The interludes act as a consolidating ‘hole’ in the text, compounding what happens in the monologues by departing from it. Similarly, Guiguet sees the interludes as the ‘overture to an opera, presenting all the essential motifs in compressed form and in their mutual relationship’.34 The interaction of interludes with the monologues is a well-covered area, theoretically, which I would like to exemplify briefly with a focus on one of the recurring aspects of each interlude, the interior of the house. 35 The various focuses of the interludes, the sea, the birds and countryside, for example, articulate different ‘modes’ of natural activity. The sea enacts an elemental cosmic fury, the earth and the fields a sweeping global expansiveness, the birds an industrious mimesis of human life, and the house suggests a static, abstract, mental, more esoteric mode. The domestic interior, which suggests neither human nor natural environment, gives Woolf the opportunity to express the finer contours of the metaphysic, providing a tranquil pause in comparison to the kinesis of the rest of the work: The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers revealed themselves upheld by streaks of light. Tables and chairs rose to the surface as if they had been sunk under water and rose, filmed with red, orange, purple like the bloom on the skin of ripe fruit. The veins on the glaze of the china, the grain of the wood, the fibres of the matting became more and more finely engraved. Everything was without shadow. A jar was so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet. Then shapes took on mass and edge. Here was the boss of a chair; here the bulk of a cupboard. And as the light increased, flocks of shadow were

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driven before it and conglomerated and hung in many-pleated folds in the background. (89–90) It is the very simplicity that is so potent with metaphysical suggestion, as Deleuze and Guattari foresaw. Woolf is conducting a kind of literary chemistry here: handling different sensual qualities with such subtlety that they are distilled into intensity. She therefore creates high drama in a scene, where, effectively, nothing is happening at all: the text is following the movement of the virtual. Objects – through their colours, shapes, and textures – animate themselves variously for the eye of the observer. This arena of depth, form and surface is in close-knit communication with the descriptions of the house in other interludes. It thereby contributes to the ‘truth’ of the whole work: that ‘knowledge’ and perception are themselves temporally and spatially contingent. Hence the varying emphasis on both the quality (content) and form of the objects in the room is adjusted subtly in each interlude in accordance with the time of day. In an earlier interlude, it is the quality of green rather than the form of the jar which is primary, and as such lends itself to fantasy rather than facticity, apprehended as ‘something green in the window corner [ ... ] a lump of emerald, a cave of pure green like stoneless fruit’ (21), thereby evoking the suggestibility of childish consciousness. In the above (the middle of the day) when light has reached its peak of interaction with the inside of the house, both the form (the fact) of the jar and its quality (or content) – green – are operating at full and equal intensity, mirroring the peak of self-definition and ability in the lives of the six. Later on in the day, when light ‘made the window waver in the side of the green jar’ (152), both the fact of the jar and its quality (green), are secondary, hence only obliquely represented. In this later image, which is synchronous with the old age of the characters, it is not that form and quality are any less ‘known’, but that they have less meaning, less imperative, less force. Hence they are a function of what they reflect – a window – which significantly, is itself only the indirect mediator of something else – symbolically memory and the past. Thus ‘knowledge’ and perception are temporally contingent, just as they are in life, when time is experienced differently in accordance with age, and different ages give rise to different sorts of knowledge. The notion of not just temporal but spatial contingency is also conveyed by the intense drama of the subtle events in this static arena: that the scene is ‘without shadow’ in the centre of the passage, and at the end it is densely impregnated with shadow, renders this moment a

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minute and yet dramatic point of change. Objects, satiated with light, spill their qualities and generate deep shadow, which is the radical antithesis of the light that creates it. This otherwise imperceptible change is highly dramatised here, and shadow seems to aggressively impose itself: ‘driving’ itself into the otherwise placid, static room with its ‘mass and edge’ and inhabiting ‘boss’ and ‘bulk’. Light does not just act on objects; it impregnates them. The subtlety and the drama of the entry of shadow occurring in a static environment stage a kind of visual alchemy with a cinematic effect. As in ‘Time Passing’, the text is a dynamic microscope, which has refined and slowed its perception to such a degree that it calibrates infinitely subtle alterations. Just as for Deleuze and Guattari, the chief action of a plane of consistency is consolidation, so the action of the interludes in The Waves is principally one of consolidating and ‘thickening’ what happens in the main body of the text. By working on the micro level like this, and by working principally with difference – both functional and qualitative – Woolf is working positively and dynamically in the intermediate realm, she is working in-between duality, between form and content, and time and space. Woolf is practicing a (literary) form of what Deleuze, drawing from Gilbert Simondon, describes as creative ‘modulating’. Rather than imposing a finite and external narrative mould on her subject matter,36 in The Waves Woolf is modulating or ‘molding in a continuous and variable manner’; in other words, she is cultivating or practicing infinite difference.37 Qualitative difference, of character and of the interludes, is an aspect of the textual rhythm that ‘modulates’ from within, insofar as it produces multiple combinations and patterns that it would likely be impossible to pick up in any one reading. It is these multiple combinations of difference that cause the text to reverberate from within itself, like a piece of music.

The rhythm of time Time in The Waves is handled in an enormously compressive and ‘concrete’ way; it is both metaphorical and rhythmically complex. A striking metaphor of time in The Waves, part of its rhythm of time, are the geometric shapes, the arbitrarily occurring ‘globes’ and ‘drops’, which are for Bernard the ‘true cycles [ ... ] the true events’ (153).38 Holly Henry argues that Woolf had a ‘life-long fascination with the view of earth from space’ and it is this which encouraged her ‘global aesthetic vision’ and which led her to use ‘the globe as a trope by which she defined the

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scope of a human life’.39 In The Waves there are daily globes or droplets: the ‘drop that forms on the roof of the soul in the evening is round, many-coloured’ (65) and life-stage drops when Bernard perceives the time of youth as changing from being a ‘sunny pasture covered with a dancing light [ ... ] widespread as a field at midday’ to being pendent as a drop which ‘falls from a glass heavy with some sediment’ (153). There are communal drops, such as at the dinner party: a ‘thing that we have made, that globes itself here’ (119) and also Bernard’s multiple drops of silence at Hampton Court: ‘Drop upon drop [ ... ] silence falls’ (187). The implication of life’s significant moments as amounting to no more than two or three meaningful ‘globes’ or drops enforces the notion of the enormity of an infinite ocean of time, like the millennial time of Orlando. Drops express and register time not as linear passage, but as qualitative experience. Thus Bernard is keen to reassure himself: ‘It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another drop. Time has given the arrangement another shake [ ... ] the true order of things – this is our perpetual illusion – is now apparent’ (226–227). These drops are the irregular and yet positive pulsing of the temporality of the narrative as vital organism, the non-pulsed element of organic time which is not all mechanical: they are the substantive experience of time, rather than its abstract idea. They are time impregnated with Being. Yet finally they are expressions of human and temporal insufficiency and limitation. Bernard is ultimately aware that we ‘pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers’ (210). In his summary Bernard’s view of the globes becomes ironic, hence: ‘the illusion is upon me that something adheres for a moment, has roundness, weight, depth, is completed. This, for the moment, seems to be my life. If it were possible, I would hand it to you entire (199)’. These drops measure out the changing character of Bernard’s sense and concept of time, and time’s significance, over the course of life. They are the unprecedented yet distinct moments when the dynamic whole of life and Being shifts and changes shape. Taken together, the drops form an order that creates a lasting image of the text as globes within globes: daily drops within life-stage drops within mystical, communal moments. Each is a part of the other and together they generate an order of temporal incommensurability – a virtual time, in which the enormous and the insignificant, the absolute and the relative, coexist.40 Bernard continues to preside over the temporal topology of the work, negotiating its periodic contradictions. Thus of the dead Percival he reflects: ‘You shall remain the arbiter. But for how long? Things will

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become too difficult to explain: there will be new things; already my son. I am now at the zenith of an experience. It will decline’ (127). In this way, human life over time follows a process of oscillations and vicissitudes, and these comprise its rhythm: they are qualitative changes that continually alter the direction of life’s flow.41 Yet it is Bernard’s summary: his comprehensive, ‘outside’ mapping of the past that stands not only as the principal orchestration of the rhythm of time in The Waves, but as its reconciliation with the rhythm of space. In the summary, Bernard’s mnemonic creation, there is a great sense of a surging and receding sea of life: he recalls the death of Percival that concurred with the birth of his first child, and launched him into a period of questioning. He then recalls being drawn into camaraderie with Neville, from whom he subsequently turned away. He finds ways to summarise his friends and yet as he does, feels them slipping from his grasp. Recalling the Hampton Court reunion he swings from the communality of himself, Neville, Susan and Jinny to the asociality of Rhoda and Louis, ‘the conspirators’ (232). Following the death of Rhoda, he mentally gravitates towards Louis, her counterpart. The report of Rhoda’s death illustrates how much more indeterminate time has become in the summary: Bernard’s telling of it is his recollection, yet our first awareness of it. The text is now a dense conflation of the past: of things already said and evoked and of the intermingled older life of them all, as mediated through him. The summary has the effect of a gathering, intensifying, consolidating maelstrom: oceanic and musical. These wave-like oscillations of the summary echo the pendulous metaphysics of Orlando, whose tendency was to swing from one category and mode of thought to its opposite in his/her assimilation of the spirit of an age. Bernard and the summary are in a process of creative consolidation and reduction that is also – from the point of view of the narrative vital organism – both a teleological necessity and a prefiguring of his death. Indeed the summary is a creative rendering of the formula behind the rhythms of time and space that have guided the whole work, of which Bernard has now become the arbiter. Like the final chapter of To the Lighthouse, there is a full shift into the artistic stage of the narrative and it becomes imbued with musical character, both explicitly and implicitly. Thinking of his friends, Bernard reflects: ‘How impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole – again like music’ (214). There are also dense rhythms at work, hence: ‘I saw the first leaf fall on his grave. I saw us push beyond this moment, and leave it behind us forever’ (221). Many of the summary’s

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monologues commence with a three-stroke repetition such as this, with alliteration and repetition on at least two words, both of which I indicate with underlining, hence: ‘So the sincerity of the moment passed; so it become symbolical; and that I could not stand’ (221), and ‘the train came in. Lengthening down the platform, the train came to a stop. I caught my train’ (225). The rhythmic device is subtle: this part of the summary is crafted to recapitulate in a concentrated way the earlier growing sections of Bernard’s life, thus the repetition of two words suggests the pulsing growth of something, whilst the three-stroke phrases, enhanced by alliterative continuity on certain words, move this part of the text toward the separate rhythm of art, and his mature existence. The last and perhaps sovereign aspect of the rhythm of time in The Waves, which also comes to the fore in the summary, is its style of temporal ‘holism’ or what I have previously observed as the tendency for characters to refract different parts of the desiring-machine of life at different stages (of their lives and in the text). This is that which holds that everything is ‘true’ insofar as it occurs and has its place at a given stage of life. We had a hint of this earlier on in Jinny, who confronted her atomical insignificance in the ageing process. In the same way, Bernard is confronted in later life with the full reality of the second flow or the flow of non-pulsed, irregular time, the ‘model’ of death (the Body without Organs), which impels him to abandon all of his former constructions of thought and belief. He turns to his own arid time of life, the trough of his life’s wave, the point where being ‘coils useless on the mud where no tide comes’ (225), where ‘force ebbs away and away into some dry creek’ (223), and later, where ‘the rhythm stopped’ (236). Yet although this may seem to be a time of non-flow, for Deleuze and Guattari, as I have quoted previously, not just living things, but ‘drying up, death [and] intrusion have rhythm’.42 Similarly Bernard is compelled to create out of the wreckage of his own limitations: ‘I took my mind, my being, the old dejected, almost inanimate object, and lashed it about among these odds and ends, sticks and straws, detestable little bits of wreckage, flotsam and jetsam, floating on the oily surface’ (225). Something comes from aridity: now if one wants to generate anything at all one must recycle what one already has, because subsidence of life, dissolution and loss are paradoxically also flows. The non-vital or inorganic returns to become organic and vital, just as the semantic terms of a dualism mutate through time and come to be synonymous with the same thing. The reductive oscillations continue, until Bernard is no more than a humble singularity – an old man hanging off a gate. But

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again what this last section – which is both a summary and a lament of old age – principally suggests, is that growing old is a process of diffusion into the second flow or type of time: there is the pulsed construction and definition of youth and a diffusion and magnanimity in old age. To live life fully is to accept that it involves an increasingly drastic deconstruction and negation of the metaphysical foundation on which it is built. Thus Bernard finds that no stories are true (199), and he begins to ‘long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement’ (199), such as might be a truer expression of life. He moves from the organic to the molecular, just as Jinny did previously. Throughout Bernard has expressed a need for a more gestural language: not of ‘consecutive sentences’, but of ‘a bark, a groan’ (210), ‘a howl; a cry’ (246), or something as random and formidable as the clouds on a stormy day: ‘always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost’ (200). Thus, like the rhythm of space (or difference) in The Waves, the rhythm of time is also reconciliatory of the two flows of life and death (pulsed and nonpulsed time). In the final event it submerges all duality in the univocal substance of narrative, that same substance of the desiring-machines in which everything folds into its opposite: time ‘becomes’ space, linear progression becomes rhizomatic diffusion, and form becomes content. Bernard is paramount in this process in which everything ultimately becomes what it is not, and yet to acknowledge this, is a creative act in itself.

The rhythm of art Bernard embodies a third rhythm or term like the tripartite rhythms that have threaded all through Woolf’s work. This third rhythm is neither space nor time, but art. He occupies an exemplary position in the text: he represents the creative principle, by being a writer, and he orchestrates the other rhythms. He serves an important machinic function: he is a desiring-machine in that he is what he does. As person and creative thinker he has multiple identities. He knows that ‘this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny, or Rhoda’ (234), and his ‘philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once’ (182). He is the closest to what life in essence ‘is’, which is mutability. His pliable personality is a model of what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘auto-objective’43 artistic practice, one that takes its

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stimulus from its territory. He is ‘made and remade continually’ (109) and notes that ‘to be myself [ ... ] I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self’ (95). Bernard is comparable to the third type of consolidating activity Deleuze and Guattari identify on a plane of consistency: which is a ‘superposition of disparate rhythms, an articulation from within of an interrhythmicity’.44 He enacts this internal interrhythmic function; through the greater focus on Bernard Woolf modulates her work from within and the geometric shapes and the summary come through him. As the rhythm of art Bernard is simultaneously outside, as well as inside of the text. Through him Woolf the artist also modulates from without; he is an expression of her insofar as he is a writer in her own style and mentality. Hence: Yet something is added to my interpretation. Something lies deeply buried. For one moment I thought to grasp it. But bury it, bury it; let it breed [ ... ] After a long lifetime, loosely, in a moment of revelation, I may lay hands on it, but now the idea breaks in my hand. Ideas break a thousand times for once that they globe themselves entire. They break; they fall over me. (129) This is very similar to the way in which The Waves germinated in the author herself, by a kind of semi-conscious and fitful gestation process.45 The passage suggests art is a fertile, three-fold process of generation, re-absorption and deferred emergence – a material cycle – very similar to the operations of the plane observed in To the Lighthouse, where ontological subjectivity, the narrative as percept and artistic consciousness all act in a similar way as a transcendental field absorbing and transmuting reality. Hence the densely worked two-stroke rhythm in the above, which suggests something not yet yielded. In The Waves Bernard is the third link in a cyclical artistic process that is a function of the vital rhythm of the whole work; it is generalised, rather than localised, as in To the Lighthouse. The compounding or integration of art as theory and art as practice are taken to a new level in this work and the third beat is the event of integration. Throughout the work and particularly through Bernard and in the last section, Woolf repeats the third integrative beat, hence in Bernard’s summary, ‘life is pleasant. Life is good. The mere process of life is satisfactory’ (218). This is the same as the rhythms occurring in To the Lighthouse. Here, in the densely worked summary the beats represent a significant point of consolidation and organisation of the narrative material: they

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send out an echo (an absolute noise) that lasts long after they have occurred. Woolf’s deployment of three-stroke rhythm is axiomatic as is Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a third term or intermediate dimension in their ‘transcendental empiricism’. Through this element of authorial intermediacy The Waves is finally a textual machine such as Deleuze and Guattari describe as that in which ‘there is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)’. Rather, continue Deleuze and Guattari, there is an ‘assemblage’ that forms connections between multiplicities drawn from each of these three orders, and the result is that ‘a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject’.46 The Waves is a conjunction of the three multiplicities: world, book, and author. We feel the triangular relation between multiplicities or artistic meta-narrative at incidental moments in the book: it is the third stroke of the rhythm of art that completes The Waves as literary machine. For example, Susan, at a pivotal point of adulthood, questioning the moment when one becomes old, asks: ‘Where can the shadow enter?’ (159), and one would assume that the author was posed with the precisely same artistic challenge in the fourth natural interlude: how to depict the precise moment when shadow enters a room, or forms around an object. Bernard also is ‘sedulous to take note of shadows’ (238), just as when he writes to a sweetheart he notes that ‘the rhythm is the main thing in writing’ (63) and Neville reflects that to read a certain poem ‘one must have myriad eyes’ (165). There is a subtle humour to such moments in which the text exhibits its own ‘clues’. The reality of creating reality is always hovering in The Waves. Finally in the summary Bernard has, implicitly, taken over the role of nature, in becoming the immanent creator. Thus he decries the ‘stupidity of nature’ (224), in her cycles of incessant vitality and dissolution, those exemplified in the final interlude by the scattered leaves that settle ‘with perfect composure on the precise spot where they would await dissolution’ (197). Yet, by the same token, it is this ‘perfect composure’ of Nature’s processes, both here and more generally in The Waves, which paints her as awesome beyond our comprehension, and humankind as limited. It is humans who must try and muster their self-composure in the face of loss. On the whole, the reader is left with an ambivalence regarding the notion that art, a human endeavour, is superior in bringing permanence, when the overall metaphysic enunciated by The Waves is of pure kinesis: a universe swimming in particles of change. Thus although one of the central themes in both The Waves and To the

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Lighthouse is that the creation of something permanent through art is a necessary defence against the transience and tyranny of nature, actually the form of The Waves ultimately articulates the opposite idea: that the fixity that art offers is itself an illusion. The book is no more than a metaphysical ‘code’ for the operations of the flux of which the author is cognisant, and an admission I think, that there are other realms that she cannot feign to know about. Nature is bigger and more machinically complex than art can ever hope to represent or be. In the vast timescale of an ever-changing universe, there are only multiple and relative orders of speed and form, and it is all we can do to designate our own reference points.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter has been to map a particularly metaphysically fruitful period of Woolf’s writing, one that followed on from her stylistically experimental work, To the Lighthouse. The reading of Orlando foregrounds the later work. Orlando is a text of material intuition with enormously liberated space and time. The novel-biography invokes both parodic fast-track views of historical change in England over three centuries and grandiose moments of England’s cultural stasis. These waves and crystallisations of history are the playful counterparts of the serious meditations and technical crafting of The Waves. The Waves is Woolf’s formal ceremony of life that includes a self-reflexive recognition of its relation with its own artistic medium. The prose-poem is a diligently constructed invocation of the symbiotic relation between life and art on their shared primary level of territorial construction, in which art becomes a ceremony of life, and vice versa. In my mapping of The Waves as a narrative ‘vital organism’ I followed three stages of the text: the cosmic, the corporeal, and the artistic. The narrative stage of childhood in The Waves is the most palpably ‘cosmic’: the child’s consciousness is presented as a sensory tissue reverberating with complex intuition of life. In this way (as with the opening episode of Joyce’s Ulysses), the initial childhood period stands as a heuristic code for the life of the book that ensues. I see the next section of the text, that corresponding to the developing adult life of the characters, as equal to the growing ‘body’ of the narrative organism and the parallel evolution of individual, collective, and the text. This textual fabric mediated complex combinations of life, death, solitude and community in accordance with their molar or molecular constitution. In The Waves core polarities of life, both metaphysical and thematic, are virtually

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mixed, but differentially separable, by way of rhythm. The Waves attains harmonious reconciliation of all its aspects because of its complete mechanical absorption of its own content and form, over its temporal, and through its spatial, schema, and through its collapsing of the gap between author, world and text. By way of the third rhythm of The Waves, the rhythm of art, the text comes full circle. The rhythm of art is the third link in a transcendentally empirical ‘cosmic’ narrative that is accountable to its own materials and which connects with the ‘outside’ of the world by forming a relation between its content, its creator and itself. The rhythm of art – the third stroke – brings the duality of life to univocity. Indeed all Woolf’s work studied here contains the implication that univocity can only be acknowledged through an act of artistic creation. There are several ways of conceiving of The Waves in the light of the journey this chapter has taken through the work. The Waves is a form of narrative ‘water’ in which everything is born of, and folds into everything else; it is a mathematical literary equation for duration; an event of what might be called ‘bio-art’ or ‘geomorphic’ art, as Deleuze and Guattari say of the cosmic work of art.47 In creating it, Woolf does not allow the narrative surface to multiply into unbounded, inorganic material extension (as in Joyce), but the work remains organically vital by retaining its depth and its positive difference – its positive passive, as well as its positive active. In this way, the work ‘breathes’ like an organism: it is both surface and depth. The Waves is the most ‘purely’ machinic out of all the novels selected in this book: there is almost no point at which one can say the work is more mechanical machine or more vital organ, more practice or more theory – it is so perfectly a blend of both. Woolf’s journey into the mechanical state/machinic practice of modernity is conducted in a markedly different way to the other writers. In To the Lighthouse she ‘revealed’ the mechanical in the human: both in consciousness, in the interior monologue technique, and in social relations, which had hitherto been understood as ostensibly natural. The mechanical state of modernity and its conversion into machinic practice is not something Woolf rushed in to: she never imported the impersonal/the mechanical as an abstract idea, like Lawrence in his allotropic narrative, nor did she embrace a world of machines as rapidly and on simultaneously theoretical and pragmatic levels, like Joyce. It is because of this measured approach that the mechanical is neither something she can so easily relinquish, as did Lawrence, nor use as such a dehumanising, materialising force, as did Joyce. There is a sense in which her comparative avoidance of what I

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have constructed as the ill effects of the journeys of the other two writers, is an effect of her more comprehensive and judicious weaving of the mechanical in with the human and life, on the level of form. But this is not to say that Woolf’s work isn’t vulnerable to the same accusations levelled at mechanical aesthetic creations – that of abstraction. She has been accused of retreating into form. In The Waves the mechanical side of representation, its status as an economic ‘currency’, manifests ever more as homogeneity of tone and a consequent difficulty of the reading process. But where Lawrence and Joyce negatively stagnate somewhat, the first veering towards over-defensive protection of vital organic life from modernity, and the second towards an over-schematised mechanism of modernity, the achievement of The Waves, in contrast, is that it sustains contact with the fragile balance between representation and life to a greater extent, to the margin of activity that contains clues to evolutionary processes and development. It is in this sense that Woolf does not really fall out of balance with the human or with vital forces, even as she becomes highly technical.

Conclusion

This book has been constructed as a machine to make journeys through the novels in order to draw out the important metaphysical ‘debates’ and tensions occurring in them, and in modernism more widely as a cultural movement. The most obvious challenge that can be issued to this study is to ask how this reading is in any way different from common accounts of modernism, much of the customary terminology of which – both aesthetic and ideological – I have certainly employed. Is using Deleuze and Guattari in conjunction with literature not just a way of describing modernism in a more technical way? In a certain reductive sense – yes. But to reduce this project to both technical formulations and to interpretations generated on the basis of technical formulations takes away from what this book has attempted to do. My central work here has been to monitor the immanent journeys of the texts: in my view their most compelling aspect. I have endeavoured to uncover the unmediated and, to a large extent, pre-conscious forces and metaphysical effects (acoustic, ‘chemical’, sensible, sexual, cinematic and rhythmical) that populate these novels and also their – less unconscious but nonetheless effective – ironic, cynical, and dictatorial voices and elements. Rather than relying on a traditional interpretive reading, which revolves around a relatively fixed and dualistic relation between text and theorist, the machinic construction of this book has attempted to open up a new reading space demarcated by the tripartite conjunction of reader, theory and text, which enables the reader a freer empirical ‘experience’ of these immanent forces. The pragmatic concepts of Deleuze and Guattari offer creative and mobile conceptual frameworks with which to track these immanent textual movements. The machinic imperatives of this book have caused it to develop into an ‘expressive’, creative account of modernism and the novels; an 189

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account that is, admittedly, largely unheeding of the actual chronology of either the novels or the wider cultural impulses and historical events of the period. But it is precisely this creative account that has served the interests of what I have argued is the intrinsic organic-mechanical metaphysic of modernism, and Woolf who emerges as the most honed and subtle cosmic ‘artisan’ of this metaphysic. In short, Woolf strikes the mathematical balance that the others do not. By retreating infinitely into the paradox of organ-machine, life-death and life-art, her work is light enough to ‘chime’ with the cosmos. She successfully avoids what are arguably the chief liabilities of her representational medium and of modernity itself – materialism and dogma. Her work is consequently a kind of blueprint for good practice: an ethical, implicitly ecological, and a spiritual achievement.

Notes 1

Towards a Literary Critical Machine

1. Kenneth Surin also notices the ‘emphatic’ modernism of Deleuze’s selection of writers and asks whether Deleuzian geoliterature is not just a form of ‘repristinated modernism’. ‘The Deleuzian Imagination of Geoliterature’, in Deleuze and Literature, ed. by Ian Buchanan and John Marks (Edinburgh University Press, 2000) pp. 167–193, p. 185. 2. LeCercle conducts close readings of works by Joyce and Woolf (The Dead and the essay Kew Gardens) amongst other authors. Bogue uses Proust, Kafka, Carroll, Artaud, Sade and Masoch in his reading. John Hughes, Lines of Flight (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); Jean-Jacques LeCercle, Deleuze and Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature (New York, London: Routledge, 2003). 3. See The Turn of the Century: Modernism and Modernity in Literature and the Arts, ed. by Christian Berg, Frank Durieux and Geert Lernout (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1995) for an extremely comprehensive overview of this complex period of cultural history. I am aware of these multiple elements in and accounts of modernism, and wish in no way to simplify this well-established and complex field of study. Rather, I want to hone in on the implications of this period for the mechanical and the organic dialectic, and track the tension of the debate through immanent readings of the literary texts. My project is therefore one that all at once partially rests on, elaborates on, and departs from modernist critical accounts. 4. Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). 5. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 33. Henceforth abbreviated as DR. 6. Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (London: UCL Press, 1993), p. xi. 7. DR, p. 33. 8. Hardt, p. xii and DR, p. 268. 9. DR, p. 39. 10. DR, p. 266. 11. Hardt, p. xiii. 12. Deleuze adapts his concept of univocity and the corresponding concept of the plane of immanence, from Spinoza. 13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 249. Henceforth abbreviated as TP. 14. TP, p. 20.

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15. It is the ‘genesis of affirmation’ of difference that escapes us every time we determine difference as negative. Yet, argues Deleuze, there is a ‘more profound genetic element, of that power or ‘will’ which engenders the affirmation and the difference in affirmation’, in the light of which negativity is secondary. DR, p. 55. 16. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘desiring-machines’ or flows of partial objects function on a localised, ‘concrete’ level that brings about a continual interchange between form and function – between the whole and the parts. The result is a vital ‘whole’; a whole that continually differs from itself in an ongoing mutation. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 1. Henceforth abbreviated as AO. 17. John Johnston, ‘Machinic Vision’, Critical Inquiry, 26 (1999), p. 27–48 (p. 28). 18. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 14. 19. Bergson was not the sole figure in these innovations. Other early twentiethcentury mathematicians and philosophers such as G.E Moore, A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell were also corroborating the scientific developments by developing theories surrounding the material nature of perception. Also circulating were waves of interest in cosmic, psychic and paranormal phenomena, which might be seen as concurrent with the scientific developments. Deleuze, along with much other ongoing contemporary cultural studies discourse, is in a reciprocal relation with these early twentieth-century developments, recapitulating and embellishing the theories of these key figures. 20. Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. by Paul Patton (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 1.

2

The Spatiotemporality of To the Lighthouse

1. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. by Leonard Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975), p. 139. Henceforth abbreviated as WD. 2. TP, p. 343. 3. For Deleuze, it is the abstract or transversal line that is key in music, painting and art; the line links them. A line of flight is a dynamic, virtual process or pathway running between life’s multiple dimensions and causing these dimensions to be in a state of ceaseless change. 4. TP, pp. 266, 251, 254. 5. TP, pp. 265, 270. 6. Deleuze’s wound analogy is an allusion to the work Les Capitales by Joe Bousquet. Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. by Anne Boyman (New York: Zone, 2001), pp. 25–33 (pp. 31–32). [Originally published as ‘L’Immanence: Une vie’, Philosophie 47 (1995)]. 7. In essence, Deleuze’s notion of transcendental empiricism refers to relations that are outside of their terms: a field of becoming activity that is ‘in contrast to everything that makes up the world of the subject and the object’. Pure Immanence, p. 25.

Notes 193 8. TP, p. 282. 9. That it is the unformed plane (of immanence) that is revealed to us, and the formal plane which is always hidden, suggests the high degree of fluidity between the two planes within their mutual threshold, the threshold is the very seat of activity. 10. Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977), p. 118. 11. Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 40–41. 12. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) [1927], p. 8. Further references to this novel will be given after quotations in the text. 13. Deleuze and Guattari contend that the human contemporary psychic norm is of neurosis and lack of any genuine creative – revolutionary – potential, a condition reinforced by the psychoanalytic culture of the Oedipus complex. In effect, psychoanalytic Oedipus is a paralogism that is falsely implanted in the psyche, which works by ‘tying off the unconscious on both sides’ (AO, p. 81). 14. AO, p. 111. 15. TP, p. 281. 16. Aden Evans, ‘Sound Ideas’, in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. by Brian Massumi (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 171–187 (p. 171). 17. Evans, pp. 177, 179. 18. Evans, pp. 177, 181. 19. Evans paints this mediated quality of sound in terms of a live concert: Noise is the reservoir of force which, in its repeated contractions, forces the flow of music through the musicians, the instruments, the audience. In the greatest performances, performers feel this flow when they ‘float’, when the sound sweeps through them, revealing that its sense, its movement comes not from within the musician, but from the unconscious implicated, the contraction of the noise of the room, the air, the bodies of the listeners. The performers are straits of contraction, where the flow of force is narrowed, focused, to the point of perception. (p. 180) 20. Evans, pp. 177, 178, 179. 21. In a rudimentary sense, Deleuze’s concept of ‘transcendental empiricism’ denotes relations that are exterior to their terms. Transcendental empiricism qualifies therefore as something like a formal theory of the in-between. See a good introductory exposition of the concept by John Marks in Vitalism and Multiplicity (Stirling, VA: Pluto, 1988), pp. 83–85. 22. Kathleen McCluskey, Reverberations: Sound and Structure in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1986), p. 84. 23. TP, p. 277. 24. Deleuze and Guattari describe ‘proximity’ further: ‘Proximity is a notion, at once topological and quantal, that marks a belonging to the same molecule, independently of the subjects considered and the forms determined.’ TP, pp. 272–273.

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25. TP, pp. 291, 248, 276. 26. TP, pp. 279, 280. Note that Deleuze and Guattari use ‘world’ as an (infinitive) verb in this context. 27. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’ Woolf describes these intense ontological-mystical moments, which derive from colour, sound and sensible memories of early childhood, as ‘rapture rather than ecstasy’, and as moments that can ‘still be more real than the present moment’. Her revelation that she is merely the channel for the rapture, causes Woolf to wonder whether ‘things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence?’ Yet where Woolf’s moments of being are carefully observed mystical phenomenon, drawn from actual psychic experience, a concept like becoming is little more than an imaginative literary proposal. Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind (Sussex University Press, 1976), pp. 64–137 (pp. 66, 67). 28. AO, p. 100. 29. AO, p. 61, pp. 77–78. Deleuze and Guattari assert that religion works in a similar way to oedipal familialism. The holy trinity imposes a triangular psychic structure that makes illegitimate use of the flows of desire in the unconscious. Making use of Kantian terminology, they argue that whilst the familial triangle (father, mother, child) represents the minimum conditions under which an ego differentiates itself ‘with regard to generation, sex, and vital state’, the religious triangle (the trinity) pertains to the maximum conditions under which persons are differentiated, and which works by positioning God as the ‘master of the exclusions and restrictions that derive from [a] disjunctive syllogism’, thus to become that from whom ‘all things derive [ ... ] by a restriction of a larger reality’ (AO, pp. 75, 77, 76). Mrs Ramsay is aware of this in-built restriction in her own psyche. Preferable to this hampered psyche for Deleuze and Guattari is a free-play of the unconscious, where a subject passes through all possible designations of God and man in a ‘generalized drift’ of usage of the syntheses of the unconscious, rather than of their meaning or derivation. 30. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Sonnenschein, 1911) [1896], p. 281. Henceforth abbreviated as MM. 31. MM, p. 175. 32. MM, p. 30. 33. MM, p. 29. 34. ‘Bad conscience’ is Nietzsche’s term for what he sees as the deeply ingrained negativity in modern humanity that is the result of the civilising processes of history. The negativity is a result of the requirement that human beings suppress their animal instincts. See the second essay, ‘Guilt’, ‘Bad Conscience’, and Related Matters’, in On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Douglas Smith (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 39–76. 35. Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). The ‘twentieth-century view of art,

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36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

3

in contrast to the Romantic view’, argues Gillies, states that what is essential in art is not spiritual, but mechanical: it is based on ‘the way in which [ ... ] internal qualities interact with each other’ (p. 24). ‘Machinic phylum’ is another term for the abstract machine or the plane of immanence, that phenomenon on which all of the assemblages and potential combinations and mutations of molecules in their relations of ‘movement and rest, slowness and speed’ are laid out (TP, p. 254). ‘Pure perception’, writes Bergson, denotes a consciousness ‘absorbed in the present and capable, by giving up every form of memory, of obtaining a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous’ to the extent that ‘even the sensible qualities of matter would be known in themselves, from within and not from without, could we but disengage them from that particular rhythm of duration which characterizes our consciousness’ (MM, pp. 26, 75). Deleuze and Guattari begin A Thousand Plateaus by inciting us to abandon ‘arborescent’ systems of thought in favour of rhizomatic ones. The former denotes a hierarchical (organic) system of growth, structured around centralised principles. In contrast, rhizomatic proliferation is horizontal and aleatory and thus machinic, such as the way in which grass grows. TP, pp. 241, 242. For Deleuze, events are ‘not physical qualities and properties, but rather logical or dialectical attributes. They are not things or facts [ ... ] we can not say that they exist, but rather that they subsist or inhere [ ... ] They are neither agents nor patients, but results of actions and passions.’ The Logic of Sense, trans. by Mark Lester (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), pp. 4–5. Henceforth abbreviated as LS. TP, p. 249. TP, p. 250. TP, p. 313. In a similar way, Bergson aims to affirm ‘the reality of spirit and the reality of matter’ in his own project. MM, p. vii.

The Visceral-Materiality of The Rainbow

1. Sons and Lovers is widely recognised as a work of oedipal self-diagnosis on the author’s part. The novel testifies to Lawrence’s clear understanding of repressive tendencies in parent/child relationships, an understanding that he elaborated on in his polemical writing. See chapter 10 of Fantasia of the Unconscious [1922] in Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). Henceforth abbreviated separately as FU and PU. 2. Gãmini Salgãdo, A Preface to Lawrence (London and New York: Longman, 1982), p. 111. 3. Being was axiomatic to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, who contended that the drive towards acquisition of power and knowledge in Western civilisation came at the cost of a loss of the wealth and vitality of Being. Being and Time (1927) is his most recognised work on this subject.

196

Notes

4. AO, p. 351. 5. See FU, particularly the chapters, ‘The Vicious Circle’ and ‘The Lower Self’ for Lawrence’s elaboration of this idea. 6. Lawrence, D.H., The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, 8 vols, ed. by George Zytaruk and James Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1981), II, p. 183. 7. Lawrence, Letters II, p. 182. Futurism, a movement in literature, art and music, was founded in Italy in the early part of the last century by the poet F.T. Marinetti and represented an attempt to formally express the dynamism and energy of mechanical processes and machines, using violent language. See Futurist Manifestos, ed. by Umbro Appollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). 8. Gibbons suggests that Lawrence took the concept of allotropy from a footnote in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, in which Myers draws an analogy between allotropy and both superficial and non-superficial states of identity. ‘ “Allotropic States” and “Fiddle-Bow”: D.H. Lawrence’s Occult Sources,’ Notes & Queries, 35 (1988), pp. 338–341 (p. 339). 9. Suzanne Raitt, Vita & Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 122. 10. Indeed the holistic impulses and cosmic backdrop of Myers’ work can be said to share characteristics with the Deleuze-Guattarian method and vision, albeit if the focus and terminology of Human Personality centres on psychic phenomena, rather than the unconscious and its ‘machines’. 11. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 260. 12. F.W.H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1907; [German 1894]), I, p. 13. 13. Gibbons, p. 340. 14. Myers, p. 26. 15. For Lawrence, it is the unconscious which equates with the ‘essential unique nature of every individual creature’, and this nature is fundamentally ‘unanalysable, undefinable, inconceivable. It cannot be conceived, it can only be experienced, in every single instance’. PU, p. 214. 16. Myers, p. 26. 17. Myers, p. 26. 18. Myers, p. 17. 19. Jeff Wallace, D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 97. 20. Jack F. Stewart, ‘Dialectics of Knowing in Women in Love’, Twentieth Century Literature, 37. 1 (1991), pp. 59–75 (p. 60). 21. Sex and man/woman are germinal in this respect, hence in his ‘A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” ’ Lawrence writes: ‘Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new’ (p. 323). Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Cambridge University Press, 1993) [1928], ed. by Michael Squires. Further references to this novel will be given after quotations in the text. 22. Garrett Stewart, ‘Lawrence, “Being,” and the Allotropic Style’, in Towards a Poetics of Fiction, ed. by Mark Spilka (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 331–356 (p. 343).

Notes 197 23. Garrett Stewart, p. 339. 24. The only concrete date given in the novel is 1840, the time of the building of a canal on Brangwen land, leading to a prosperous period of the family’s history that is the concern of the novel. 25. For example, in his reading, Gerald Doherty alludes to the hierarchical ontology of the Anna/Will relationship. Using Deleuze-Guattarian theory, my reading will provide a more far-reaching analysis of this hierarchical stage of the novel, in relation to the other two stages. ‘The Metaphorical Imperative: From Trope to Narrative in “The Rainbow” ’, South Central Review, 6.1 (1989), pp. 46–61 (p. 54). 26. ‘Blood-intimacy’ is quoted from the novel. D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (Cambridge University Press, 1989) [1915], ed. by Mark KinkeadWeekes. p. 10. Further references to this novel will be given after quotations in the text. Martin Price, Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (Newhaven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 276. 27. AO, p. 194. 28. Salgãdo, p. 110. 29. Garrett Stewart, p. 337. 30. This environment calls to mind the concept of a ‘libidinal economy’ postulated by a group of continental thinkers including Foucault, Irigaray and Deleuze. A libidinal economy is the complexity of ways in which the libido plugs into a World; is the energy of that world. In the Brangwen world Lawrence externalises the libidinal economy; there is unobstructed fluidity between human and world and a network of energy investments that ultimately define the social field. 31. Erwin R. Steinberg, ‘D.H. Lawrence: Mythographer’, Journal of Modern Literature, 25.1 (2001), pp. 91–108 (p. 96). 32. Marianna Torgovnick, ‘Narrating Sexuality: The Rainbow’, in The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence, ed. by Anne Fernihough (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 33–48 (pp. 40–41). 33. See PU, specifically chapters 1 and 2, and AO, p. 49. 34. Torgovnick, p. 41. 35. In AO, p. 115. In Lawrence, ‘Pornography and Obscenity’, in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, ed. by E.D. McDonald (New York: Viking Press, repr. 1968) [1936], pp. 170–187. 36. AO, p. 294. 37. AO, p. 352. 38. Michael Bell, ‘Lawrence and Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence, pp. 179–196 (p. 183). 39. Cited from D.H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. by Anthony Beal (London: Heinemann, 1955), p. 115. 40. Michael Bell, D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge University Press, 1992) pp. 68–69. 41. AO, p. 351. 42. Lawrence thought of the mind and its ‘accomplice’, the will, as ‘the dead end of life’, and yet also as faculties with ‘all the mechanical force of the non-vital universe’. He thought that the mind and will should be strictly confined to being used for what they really are – secondary instruments of

198

43. 44.

45. 46.

Notes discrimination and determination – and not as superior faculties or sites of agency. PU, p. 247. The privileging of the body in this way implies that the body contains intelligence beyond the reach of the mind. Salgãdo criticises the novel’s ending for its ‘detachable quality’ (p. 120). Keith Sagar argues that it ‘is only because the early chapters were so rich [ ... ] that we feel dissatisfied with some of the less fully realised episodes of the later chapters, where Lawrence, losing interest, lapses occasionally into his Carlylean essay-style’. The Art of D.H. Lawrence (Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 72. Roger Sale argues that ‘the whole vitality and enormous “felt life” of the first part of the novel is the result of placing human relationships in the foreground; the social history is there [ ... ] but only when it can be utilized in the personal drama’. In the second half of the novel, he continues, ‘social history occasionally becomes an excuse for personal failure [ ... ] the characters are moved into the background, and even Ursula becomes shadowy’. ‘The Narrative Technique of “The Rainbow” ’, Modern Fiction Studies, 5.1 (1959), pp. 29–38 (pp. 37–38). See AO, pp. 139–140. Charles L. Ross, The Composition of the Rainbow & Women in Love (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), p. 34.

4 Ulysses: The Hyperconscious Machinic Text 1. AO, p. 153. 2. Psychoanalytic ‘oedipal’ culture, which for Deleuze and Guattari is the determining force in an imaginary capitalist culture, functions on the basis of a ‘double bind’ or ‘double impasse’. For Deleuze and Guattari, Oedipus constitutes ‘an oscillation between two poles: the neurotic identification, and the internalization that is said to be normative’. In this process the psychological problem is internalised by the adult, and then ‘rediscovered’ and ostensibly ‘solved’ in the social authority of one’s parental authority. Thus it is passed onto the child, who in turn will enter into the same neurotic process of internalisation/transferral when he/she becomes an adult. Thus the solution of Oedipus ‘offers no more of a way out than does the problem’ (AO, pp. 79–80). 3. AO, pp. 228, 257. 4. AO, p. 34. 5. See Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998 (London, New York: Verso, 1998) and Terry Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’ in Against the Grain Essays: 1975–1985 (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 131–147. 6. AO, p. 260. 7. AO, p. 240. 8. AO, pp. 263, 240. 9. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 1987), p. 47. 10. LS, p. 284.

Notes 199 11. TP, p. 6. However, it is not clear whether Deleuze ultimately considers Finnegans Wake a failure in the same way. His handling of the latter in LS implies that he deems this work as a more or less successful accomplishment of textual pragmatics and the simulacrum. 12. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans. by Ellen Esrock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) [1982], p. 30. 13. LS, p. 22. 14. LS, p. 260. 15. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1992) [1922]. Further references to this novel will be given after quotations in the text (p. 83). 16. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), p. 37. 17. Gilbert, p. 36. 18. Writing to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Letters of James Joyce, ed. by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking Press, 1957), p. 129. 19. LS, p. 260. 20. LS, p. 263, 264. 21. LS, p. 261. 22. Marilyn French, The Book as World (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1976, repr. 1977), p. 268. In the ‘Ithaca’ episode of the novel, Bloom notes that the lamplight is ‘an inconstant series of concentric circles of varying gradations of light and shadow’ (p. 870). 23. Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 47. 24. Karen Lawrence, pp. 45, 47. 25. LS, p. 264 26. LS, p. 261. 27. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Middlesex: Penguin, 1960), p. 206. 28. Christy Burns, Gestural Politics: Stereotype and Parody in Joyce (Albany: State University of New York, 2000), p. 29. 29. Eco, p. 30. Thus, argues Eco, Joyce as artist moves away from Stephen the artist from the moment he proposes to write Ulysses and ‘he reveals the deep condition that if art is a shaping activity [ ... ] then the exercise of shaping must be applied to a well-determined material, the tissue itself of the real events, psychological phenomena, moral relations, that is, to the whole of society and culture’. Eco is paraphrasing Joyce’s essay ‘Art and Life’ here (p. 29). 30. Hugh Kenner attributes marmoreality to ‘Ithaca’, but I think it also an apt term for other parts of the text. Hugh Kenner, Ulysses, rvd. edn (Baltimore, London: John Hopkins University Press, 1987) [1980], p. 135. 31. Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 151, 22, 186, 162. 32. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana, 1992) [1936], pp. 211–244.

200 Notes 33. See Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), pp. 32–33, and for the broader empirical dimensions of Bloom and Ulysses, see Anthony Cronin ‘The Advent of Bloom’, in Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by William M. Chase (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 84–101. 34. Marie-Dominique Garnier, ‘The Lapse and the Lap: Joyce with Deleuze’, in James Joyce and the Difference of Language, ed. by Laurent Milesi (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 97–111 (p. 99). 35. Deleuze and Guattari qualify the illusory workings of capitalism as the tendency by which the system ‘re-enslaves what within it tends to free itself or to appear freely’ (AO, p. 270). 36. Benjamin, note 19, p. 243. 37. Benjamin continues: ‘For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation’ pp. 231–232 (p. 233). Film is therefore a primary means of retraining the perceptual apparatus. 38. Benjamin, pp. 231, 233. 39. AO, pp. 244–245. 40. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. by Michael Eldred (London, New York: Verso, 1988). p. 7. Originally published as Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Suhrkamp Verlag) [1983]. 41. AO, p. 225. 42. Sloterdijk, pp. 5, 3, 5. 43. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, New York: Verso, 1989), p. 29. 44. Žižek, p. 29. 45. LS, p. 72. 46. LS, pp. 8–9. 47. Garnier, p. 104. 48. Ulysses, notes, p. 1101. Yet there is an irony in this insofar as the ‘death’ of language in one sense, sparked its birth in another: the birth of the critical literary tradition, which is arguably at its pinnacle in a writer like Joyce. Joyce himself understood the impact his work would have in an era of increasing discursivity, when he famously said: ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.’ Cited in Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 64, from Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 535. 49. Mark Osteen, ‘Cribs in the Countinghouse: Plagiarism, Proliferation, and Labor in “Oxen of the Sun” ’, in Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis, ed. by Morris Beja and David Norris (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), pp. 237–249 (p. 237). 50. AO, p. 240, p. 224. 51. Burns, p. 2. 52. See Joseph A. Boone, ‘Staging Sexuality: Repression, Representation, and “Interior” States in Ulysses’, in Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, ed. by Susan Stanford Friedman (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 190–221 (p. 192), and French, pp. 195–206.

Notes 201 53. 54. 55. 56.

64. 65. 66. 67.

Kenner, p. 118. LS, p. 8. LS, p. 35. ‘Space in the Age of Non-place’, Drain, 03 (2004) [accessed 27/11/2006] (note 28). Buchanan is explicitly using ‘decoded’ in the Deleuze and Guattarian sense of a noninterpretable, as opposed to a deciphered text. LS, p. 79. French, p. 11. LS, p. 22. Miller, Nicholas, A., ‘Beyond Recognition: Reading the Unconscious in the “Ithaca” Episode of Ulysses’, James Joyce Quarterly, 30.2 (1993), pp. 209–218. Miller, pp. 211, 212, 214, 213. Miller, p. 216. LS, p. 56. Deleuze also notes Joyce’s interest in the philosopher Bruno, who himself employed problematic (LS, pp. 260–261). AO, p. 33. AO, p. 34 LS, p. 74. Miller, p. 209.

5

Ideas and Life in Conflict: Lawrence’s Later Works

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

1. Lawrence’s most formalised proposals for a new way of being, namely, for men and women in marriage and as parents, are to be found in his treaties: FU and PU. 2. Colin Clarke, River of Dissolution: D.H. Lawrence and English Romanticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. x. 3. In 1919 Lawrence wrote of Women in Love that he ‘should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.’ Foreword to Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. by David Farmer and others (Cambridge University Press, 1987) [1920]. Further references to this novel will be given after quotations in the text. p. 485. 4. Garrett Stewart defines the two-phase – primitive to modern – allotropic evolution in The Rainbow as that in which ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. Towards a Poetics of Fiction, p. 342. 5. See Bell, Language and Being, pp. 97–132 and John Worthen, D.H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 90. 6. See Ronald Schleifer’s discussion of the Second Industrial Revolution and a detailed correlation of modernist modes of understanding with the mathematical and scientific advances of the same era in chapters 3 and 4 of Modernism and Time (Cambridge University Press, 2000). 7. The character Hermione has been frequently recognised as linked to the aristocrat Lady Ottoline Morell, an intellectual hostess and patron of the Bloomsbury Group, with whom Lawrence had a brief period of association. Although he attacked Morell for what he saw as her bullying will, he also admitted later: ‘I’m too much like this myself.’ Quoted from Paul Delaney, D.H. Lawrence’s Nightmare (Sussex: Harvester, 1979), p. 92.

202 Notes 8. David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), p. 163. 9. Daniel J. Schneider, ‘Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence’, South Atlantic Review, 51. 2 (1986), pp. 35–47 (p. 43). 10. In the same article as above, Schneider cites Lawrence’s notable statement that our ‘supreme’ lesson must be to ‘learn how not to know (p. 43)’. 11. Bell, Language and Being, p. 123. 12. ‘Women in Love: D.H. Lawrence’s Judgment Book’, in D.H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration, ed. by Peter Balbert and Phillip L. Marcus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 67–90 (p. 90). 13. To J.B. Pinker he wrote: ‘Out of sheer rage I’ve begun my book about Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid’. Letters II, p. 212. 14. Salgãdo, p. 81. 15. D.H. Lawrence, England, My England (Cambridge University Press, 1990) [1922], ed. by Bruce Steele, p. 13. 16. Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction rvd. edn (England: Prentice Hall, 1998), p. 36. 17. Dominick LaCapra, Madame Bovary On Trial (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 127. 18. The leadership novels were one of Lawrence’s most contentious proposals for social renewal. Lawrence argued that the vast majority of people are innately antipathetic to mental consciousness and on no account should have it awakened in them. They should live only from their ‘dynamic’ centres and their knowledge should correspondingly be ‘symbolical, mythical, dynamic’. Consequently, it is the duty of an appropriately intellectually and spiritually equipped elite to lead men (chiefly) in great, purposive action to build society (FU, pp. 76–77, 108–110). 19. D.H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod (London: Penguin, 1950) [1922]. Further references to this novel will be given after quotations in the text. p. 198. 20. FU, p. 15. 21. In his recount of their short friendship, Bertrand Russell famously wrote that Lawrence’s notion of a consciousness of the blood ‘led straight to Auschwitz’, and described the latter’s polemical views as ‘the language of a Fascist dictator’. Bertrand Russell, Autobiography 1914–1944, 3 vols (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968), II, pp. 22, 21.

6 Orlando and The Waves: Machinic Triumph of Form 1. Deleuze and Guattari’s plateau ‘Of the Refrain’ in A Thousand Plateaus, from which this quote is drawn, is itself a striking machinic topography of the ‘cosmic’ structure of multiple forms of earthly and human expression ranging from bird song, to our own art and music (p. 342). 2. For N.C. Thakur, Orlando is all of Woolf’s ‘ideas about time, personality, literature and the art of biography’. N.C. Thakur, The Symbolism of Virginia Woolf (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 90. 3. Bertrand Russell, whom Woolf knew, Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson, were among these influences. Although there is no proof Woolf read Bergson, she was no doubt aware of him through her sister-in-law Karin,

Notes 203

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

who delivered a paper on the philosopher, and more generally ‘through Cambridge thinking on time’, as Anne Banfield observes. Anne Banfield, ‘Tragic Time: The Problem of the Future in Cambridge Philosophy and To the Lighthouse’, Modernism/Modernity, 7.1 (2000), pp. 43–75 (p. 45). See also Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2003) for a detailed mapping of developments in science, astronomy and cosmology in Woolf’s era, as they impacted on and nuanced her work. In the essay ‘The Art of Biography’ Woolf reflects on the artistic and imaginative potential of biographies insofar as they tell us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest. For few poets and novelists are capable of that high degree of tension which gives us reality. But almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders. Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, ed. by Leonard Woolf, 4 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1967), IV, pp. 221–228 (pp. 227–228). Virginia Woolf, Orlando (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993) [1928]. Further references to this novel will be given after quotations in the text. p. 55. TP, p. 261. Haeccities function in the same manner as singularities, multiplicities and other virtual phenomena; they have their existence on the plane of consistency. Haeccity borrows its conceptual persona from Spinozan ‘pantheism’ insofar as it consists in relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles and capacities to affect or be affected. Deleuze and Guattari invoke Mrs. Dalloway’s walk through London as a prime example of becoming or haeccity: ‘Taking a walk is a haeccity; never again will Mrs. Dalloway say to herself, “I am this, I am that, he is this, he is that” ’ TP, pp. 260, 263. TP, p. 263. TP, p. 347. This concept of moments of stasis in Orlando I borrow from Avrom Fleishman. Fleishman observes the novel’s theme of ‘slow growth’ that is attributed to both the real ancient aristocratic family, the Sackvilles (whom Orlando represents), and the corresponding temporality of the novel’s world, with its many ‘congealed or embalmed: static and apparently dead’ images and scenes such as the great frost and the pile of objects. Avrom Fleishman, Virginia Woolf: A critical reading (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1975), p. 143. In Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway there is a suggestion of apocalyptic sentiment, hence: ‘this late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, men and women, a well of tears’, and in The Waves, where Bernard describes himself as living in ‘an old civilisation with a notebook’. Mrs. Dalloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 10, The Waves p. 153. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Oxford University Press, 1992) [1931]. Further references to this novel will be given after quotations in the text. Fleishman, p. 144. Henry, p. 77, p. 78. Henry, who acknowledges the work of Ann Banfield amongst others in her argument, claims that such theories carried over

204

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

Notes directly into Woolf’s own narrative strategy of employing multiple perspectives and a hybridity of genres in a work such as Three Guineas. TP, pp. 346, 342, 343. Henry claims the Woolfs owned The Age of the Earth (London: Ernest Benn, 1927) by Arthur Holmes, in which this calculation was made. Hence Woolf, claims Henry, had a ‘fascination with new vistas of space’ and was impelled to consider the ‘brevity of human existence in relation to the billions of years of cosmological time and claimed that contemporary aesthetic forms were inadequate in the light of that disparity’ (pp. 9, 106). TP, pp. 345, 337. TP, pp. 329, 344. In speaking about the novel Deleuze and Guattari see waves as ‘vibrations, shifting borderlines inscribed on the plane of consistency as so many abstractions’; they are an ‘abstract machine.’ Indeed the philosophers specifically invoke The Waves to enunciate their notion of literary multiplicity. They see each character as a multiplicity, for example: ‘Bernard and the school of fish’. They claim that each character advances as a single wave, but taken on the plane of consistency the characters form a ‘single abstract Wave whose vibration propagates following a line of flight or deterritorialization traversing the entire plane’ (TP, p. 252). Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and her Works, trans. by Jean Stewart (New York and London: Harvest, 1976), p. 363. Taking his impetus from the diaries, Guiguet argues that Orlando was a necessary counter of play to the more serious latter work: a ‘relieving of genius by talent’ and an ‘alternation between spontaneous and tense writing’ that was a ‘therapeutic necessity’ for Woolf, a technique which is testified to in her diaries (Guiguet, pp. 291, 81). Alice Van Buren Kelley, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Fact and Vision (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 152. TP, p. 328. For Deleuze and Guattari, the reflexive statement ‘matters of expression’ demonstrates the proximity of molecular/material to semiotic components on the level of mutual composition, in implying that expression has ‘a primary relation to matter’ TP, p. 334. Gilles Deleuze, Les Cours De Gilles Deleuze, ‘Anti Oedipe et Mille Plateaux’ Cours Vincennes: on music – 03/05/1977 English version. [accessed 26 April 2006]. WD, pp. 163–164. [C]an only ‘be wrested’, from Cours de Deleuze, 03/05/77, [accessed 26 April 2006]; ‘unifying metrical form’ from Gilles Deleuze, Les Cours De Gilles Deleuze, Conference Presentation on Musical Time – 00/00/1978. (both versions in English). TP, p. 286. AO, p. 330. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari argue against the Freudian notion of the death instinct by claiming that there is already ‘both the model and the experience of death in the unconscious’ (p. 332). Writing to Ethel Smyth. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols, ed. by Nigel Nicolson (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978), IV, p. 204. TP, p. 328.

Notes 205 30. Elicia Clements, ‘Transforming Musical Sounds into Words: Narrative Method in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves’, Narrative, 13.2 (2005), pp. 160–181 (p. 166). 31. DR, pp. 31, 57, 31. 32. Josephine O’Brien Schaefer, The Three-Fold Nature of Reality in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (London, The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1965), p. 158. 33. Woolf wrote about The Waves, that she could ‘give in a very few strokes the essentials of a person’s character. It should be done boldly, almost as caricature’ WD, p. 157. 34. Guiguet, p. 282. 35. Alice Van Buren Kelley, for example, has done an impressively detailed study of the specific connections between the interludes and the monologues in The Waves. See Van Buren Kelley, pp. 146–190. 36. See Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genиse physico-biologique (Grenoble: Million, 1995), pp. 35–60. 37. Gilles Deleuze, Les Cours de Deleuze, ‘Anti Oedipe et Mille Plateaux’, Cours Vincennes – 27/02/1979, Metal, metallurgy, music, Husserl, Simondon. [accessed 26 April 2006]. 38. I propose a third point of conceptual linkage point between Woolf’s narrative and Deleuze and Guattari’s forms of activity on the plane of consistency. As they function on the textual plane of The Waves, the geometric shapes compare with what the philosophers call ‘intercalary events’: the ‘densifications, intensifications, reinforcements, injections, showerings’. The latter are ways in which molecules cluster in a non-linear way, as a consequence of the fact that on the plane of consistency there is ‘no beginning from which a linear sequence would derive’. TP, p. 328. 39. Henry, pp. 72, 74, 76. 40. Claire Colebrook also arrives at a conception of a virtual or pure time in The Waves in her discussion of the different sorts of signs in the work. See ‘Derrida, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life’, Antithesis, 15 (2005), pp. 147–169. 41. For Deleuze and Guattari, rhythm operates ‘by heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction’ (TP, p. 313). 42. TP, p. 313. 43. TP, p. 317. 44. Yet Bernard is not interrhythmic in the fullest sense of Deleuze and Guattari’s meaning, for the same reason that The Waves is in itself not a pure plane of consistency. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari’s interrythmic position, which imposes neither ‘meter or cadence’, Bernard does bring the work to a cadence in his summary: the machinic work of art is reconciled to its organic form (TP, p. 329). 45. Guiguet comprehensively explores Woolf’s methods and processes of composition of The Waves. pp. 75–83. 46. TP, p. 23. 47. TP, p. 319.

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208 Bibliography Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). Henry, Holly, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Holmes, Arthur, The Age of the Earth (London: Ernest Benn, 1927). Hughes, John, Lines of Flight (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). Kenner, Hugh, Ulysses, rvd. edn (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1987). Kermode, Frank, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1979). LaCapra, Dominick, Madame Bovary On Trial (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). Lawrence, D.H., Aaron’s Rod (London: Penguin, 1950; first published 1922). ——— England, My England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960; first published 1922). ——— Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971; first published 1921). ——— Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; first published 1928). ——— The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, 8 vols, ed. by George Zytaruk and James Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970–2000), II (1981). ——— Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, ed. by E. D. Macdonald (Viking Press: New York, 1968; first published 1936). ——— The Rainbow (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989; first published 1915). ——— Women in Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; first published 1920). Lawrence, Karen, The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). LeCercle, Jean-Jacques, Deleuze and Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Lee, Hermione, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977). Lodge, David, The Modes of Modern Writing (London: Edward Arnold, 1977). Luckhurst, Roger, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Marinetti, F.T., Futurist Manifestos, ed. by Umbro Appollonio (Thames and Hudson: London, 1973). McLean, Clara D., ‘Wasted Words: The Body Language of Joyce’s “Nausicca” ’ in Joycean Cultures/Culturing Joyces, ed. by Vincent J. Cheng, Kimberley J. Devlin and Margot Norris (London: Associated University Presses, 1998), pp. 44–58. McCluskey, Kathleen, Reverberations: Sound and Structure in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1986). Miller, Nicholas, A., ‘Beyond Recognition: Reading the Unconscious in the “Ithaca” Episode of Ulysses’, James Joyce Quarterly, 30.2 (1993), pp. 209–218. Myers, F.W.H., Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1907; first published 1894), I. Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, trans. by Douglas Smith (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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O’Brien Schaefer, Josephine, The Three-Fold Nature of Reality in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (London, The Hague, and Paris: Mouton, 1965). Olkowski, Dorothea, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). Osteen, Mark, ‘Cribs in the Countinghouse: Plagiarism, Proliferation, and Labor in ‘Oxen of the Sun’, in Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis, ed. by Morris Beja and David Norris (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), pp. 237–249. Patton, Paul, intro., ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 1–17. Price, Martin, Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (Newhaven and London: Yale University Press, 1983). Raitt, Suzanne, Vita & Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1993). Ross, Charles, L., The Composition of the Rainbow & Women in Love (Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1979). Russell, Bertrand, Autobiography, 3 vols (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967–1969), II. Sagar, Keith, The Art of D.H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Sale, Roger, ‘The Narrative Technique of “The Rainbow” ’, Modern Fiction Studies, 5.1 (1959), pp. 29–38. Salgãdo, Gãmini, A Preface to Lawrence (London and New York: Longman, 1982). Schleifer, Ronald, Modernism and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Schneider, Daniel J., ‘Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence’, South Atlantic Review, 51. 2 (1986), pp. 35–47. Schwarz, Daniel, R., Reading Joyce’s Ulysses (Hampshire: Macmillan, 1987). Simondon, Gilbert, L’individu et sa genиse physico-biologique (Grenoble: Million, 1995). Sloterdijk, Peter, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. by Michael Eldred (London and New York: Verso, 1988). Steinberg, Erwin R., ‘D.H. Lawrence: Mythographer’, Journal of Modern Literature, 25.1 (2001), pp. 91–108. Stevenson, Randall, Modernist Fiction, rvd. edn (England: Prentice Hall, 1998). Stewart, Garrett, ‘Lawrence, “Being,” and the Allotropic Style’, in Towards a Poetics of Fiction, ed. by Mark Spilka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 331–356. Stewart, Jack F., ‘Dialectics of Knowing in Women in Love’, in Twentieth Century Literature, 37. 1 (1991), pp. 59–75. Thakur, N.C., The Symbolism of Virginia Woolf (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University, 1965). Torgovnick, Marianna, ‘Narrating Sexuality: The Rainbow’, in The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence, ed. by Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 33–48. Van Buren Kelley, Alice, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Fact and Vision (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971). Wallace, Jeff, D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).

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Woolf, Virginia, Collected Essays, ed. by Leonard Woolf, 4 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1967–1968), VI (1967). ——— Orlando (London: Penguin, 1993; first published 1928). ——— Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Jeanne Schulkind (Sussex: Sussex University Press, 1976). ——— Mrs. Dalloway (London: Penguin, 1992; first published 1925). ——— To the Lighthouse (London: Penguin, 1992; first published 1927). ——— The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols, ed. by Nigel Nicolson (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975–1980), II (1976). ——— The Waves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992; first published 1931). ——— A Writer’s Diary, ed. by Leonard Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press, 1975). Worthen, John, D.H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (Macmillan: Hampshire, 1979). Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, New York: Verso, 1989).

Online articles and lectures Buchanan, Ian, ‘Space in the Age of Non-place’, Drain, 03 (2004) [accessed 27 November 2006] Deleuze, Gilles, Les Cours De Gilles Deleuze ——— ‘Anti Oedipe et Mille Plateaux’, Cours Vincennes – 27/02/1979, English version ——— Conference Presentation on Musical Time – 00/00/1978, English version ——— ‘Anti Oedipe et Mille Plateaux’, Cours Vincennes: on music – 03/05/1977 English version http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/index.html [accessed 26 April 2006]

Index abstraction, 6–7, 8, 130 as artistic gesture, 39 as social reality, 77–83, 110 absurdity, 115, 118 aesthetics classical, 94–6, 101–2 experimental, 96–8 allotropy, 56 as literary technique, 60–1, 79, 83 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 55, 70, 91 aparallel evolution, 9–10, 12, 46, 60, 167 apocalypse, 133, 134, 135, 136–7, 203 n. 10 Aristotle, 7, 92, 95, 101 bad conscience, 45, 82, 111, 194 n. 34 becoming, 8, 9, 10, 21, 38–40, 60, 64, 92, 156, 157, 167 in life and death, 173–4 -mad, 97, 113, 117, 120 in modernism, 11 as mystical experience, 41–2, 194 n. 27 in Nature, 45–6 -woman, 39, 42, 52 Bell, Michael, 61, 72, 142 Benjamin, Walter, 109 Bergson, Henri, 13, 14, 18–20, 21, 35 homogeneous time and space, 44 intuitive method, 13, 19 perception, 45 pure perception, 46, 195 n. 37 Bergsonism (Gilles Deleuze), 13 binary, 3, 5, 12, 19–20, 36, 37, 52 as social order, 82 see also negative under duality Bogue, Ronald, 2

capitalism, 88–90 effect on representation, 91–2, 116–17, 121 visuality in, 107–8 catechism, 121, 123 chiasmus, 33 Christianity, 42, 54–5, 56 cynicism, 110–13, 136–7 Darwin, Charles, 9, 46 death, 172–4 Descartes, 6, 75 desire, 7, 11, 42, 62–5, 71, 82, 90 desiring-machines, 11, 65, 94, 174, 182, 183 deterritorialisation, 22, 47, 91, 107, 110, 113, 120–1, 126, 160 as evolutionary movement, 62–3 difference, 7, 10–11, 175–6, 179, 192 n. 15 differenc/tiation, 8–9 as hermeneutic paradox, 8 modern illusion of, 79, 125, 144 in Nature, 46 as sound, 29 double-articulation, 10, 13, 171, 172 duality, 30, 53 in aesthetics, 94–5 as negative, 71, 81–2, 122 as part of the psyche, 75 as positive, 19–20, 35–6, 80 reconciliation of, 159, 179, 183 in relationships, 33, 35 see also chiasmus; modulation duration, 18–19, 46 Eco, Umberto, 93 Einstein, Albert, 13–14, 31, 132 England, My England (D.H. Lawrence), 144 eternal return, 92 Evans, Aden, 28, 29

211

212

Index

events, 47–9, 92, 195 n. 40 in sense, 94 as textual strategy, 97, 113–14, 117–18, 155 evolution, 58–9 Fantasia of the Unconscious (D.H. Lawrence), 143, 150 Finnegans Wake (James Joyce), 101, 199 n. 11 free indirect speech, 31, 144–5, 147–8, 149 Freud, 2, 19, 56, 57, 70, 81 Futurism, 57, 60, 83, 196 n. 7 Gilbert, Stuart, 95, 102 God, 42, 54, 55 as capitalist labour principal, 111 in despotic-symbolic order, 62, 91, 126 in language, 116 Guiguet, Jean, 161, 177 haeccity, 156, 159, 203 n. 6 Hardt, Michael, 7 (n. 6) Hegel, Georg, 7–8 Henry, Holly, 159, 160, 179 history, 16, 82–3, 93, 156–8 as universal, 88–9, 90, 91, 110–11 Hughes, John, 2 humour, 48, 107, 110, 114, 122, 123–4, 185 immanence, 35, 36 as evolutionary force, 58 as (female) subjectivity, 26–8 in human behaviour, 26–7, 36 intercalary events, 205 n. 38 intervals, 175 interrhythmicity, 184 as knowledge, 50 plane of, 21–3, 170 as sound, 29 as time/rhythm, 31–2, 170 in-between, the, 20, 21, 38–9, 40–1, 67, 155, 179 irony, 48, 107, 114, 123, 124, 148, 150

kinesis, 99, 101–3, 125, 156 lack, 26, 42, 81–2, 111 reversal of, 35 Lawrence, Karen, 98–9, 102 LeCercle, Jean-Jacques, 2 Lee, Hermione, 24 libidinal economy, 197 n. 30 life, 172–4 line of flight, 192 n. 3 The Logic of Sense (Gilles Deleuze), 92 machine(s), 5, 12, 160, 172 actual, 6, 108 as intellectual/critical approach, 3–4, 9, 16, 93, 128 Nature as, 95–6 sensible, 30 textual, 48, 51, 65, 98, 104, 121, 185 as types of social organisation, 62, 66, 69, 77, 79, 82, 88–9, 90, 126 in the unconscious, 172, 174 see also desiring-machines machinic, 11–13 assemblage, 65 in the modern psyche, 80–1, 84 phylum, 195 n. 36 in thought, 9 memory, 19, 50, 155, 165–6 modernism, 3, 4–5, 13–14, 16, 101, 117, 129, 152, 189 modulation, 179 molar, 171–2 molecular, 171–2 moments of being, 194 n. 27 Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf), 203 n. 6, n. 10 multiplicity, 10 Myers, Frederick W.H., 57–9, 61 nature, 9, 43, 45, 46, 64–5, 95–6, 164, 167, 185, 186 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 45, 82, 92, 111 nonsense, 113–14 Oedipus (complex), 193 n. 13, 198 n. 2 Olkowski, Dorothea, 7

Index 213 organ abstract, 6, 7 -ism, 5 as social order, 5–7 overcoding, 62, 90, 113, 115, 116 paradox, 123 parody, 25–6, 99, 115–16 Patton, Paul, 14 perception, 23–4 Plato, 8, 92, 97, 115 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce), 95, 101 Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious (D.H. Lawrence), 143 Relativity, 48, 132 see also Einstein reterritorialisation, 89, 112–13, 116 capitalist, 108 rhizome, 46, 195 n. 38 rhythm, 21, 24, 38, 48, 64, 65, 68, 95, 168, 170, 174–5 as sexuality, 69–70 three-stroke, 31–2, 43, 50, 51, 182, 184, 185 Russell, Bertrand, 159 science, 13–14, 49, 59 sense, 94, 113 common, 119 good, 119 Simondon, Gilbert, 179 simulacrum, 92, 97–8, 99–100, 124 human, 136 Sloterdijk, Peter, 110–11 socius despotic-symbolic, 62–3, 69, 90–1 imaginary-capitalist, 62–3, 77, 82–3, 89–90, 92, 127–8 primitive-territorial, 62–3, 77, 79, 104–5 Sons and Lovers (D.H. Lawrence), 54, 195 n. 1

sound, 27–30, 160–1, 193 n. 19 space, 49–50, 169 Spinoza, Baruch de, 21, 56 stasis, 101–3, 158, 203 n. 9 stream of consciousness, 23, 30, 95 territory, 162–4, 166 third term, 51 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari), 10, 12, 60, 156 time, 18–19, 22–3, 43, 44, 61, 72, 82, 157–8 as creative, 41 non-pulsed, 170, 171, 180, 183 pulsed, 166–7, 170–1 as sound, 28 in the stream of consciousness, 31 universal/millennial, 154, 158 transcendence, 24–6 plane of, 21–3, 31, 32, 170 as social behaviour, 25–6, 36 transcendental empiricism, 30, 185, 192 n. 7, 193 n. 21 transcendental field, 23, 40, 184 unconscious, the, 11, 42, 196 n. 15 bondage of, 24, 42, 54, 81–2 liberation of, 19 libidinal, 70 as religious, 42, 54, 194 n. 29 univocity, 8–9, 20–1 virtuality, 21, 22, 23, 87 as time, 170, 180, 186 Wallace, Jeff, 59 Whitehead, Alfred North, 159 will, the, 80, 81, 82, 83, 131, 137, 145, 197 n. 42 Žižek, Slavoj, 111